The Always-Present Past: The Past as a Place to Inhabit in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night CLAUDIA EXCARET SANTOS CAMPUSANO College

Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) is an American script writer who was born in a Broadway hotel. His play Long Day’s Journey into Night presents certain parallelism with his life. Long Day’s Jorney into Night portrays, as the title states, the long day in the life of a family in which the approach of their decay seems as inevitable as nightfall.

Throughout the play, the characters, James Tyrone (the father), Mary (the mother), Jamie (their elder son), and Edmund (their younger son), perform a repetitive routine in which they use the past to blame each other and explain the present. Mary’s principal complaint towards her husband is that “[he] never [gave her] a home” (O’Neill 92). The plot occurs in a house; there are no outdoor scenes. However, for Mary, this house is not a home because it is their summer home and “it was wrong from the start. Everything was done in the cheapest way. [Tyrone] would never spend the money to make it right” (O’Neill 57). Besides this summer house, the family does not possess a permanent living place; they live in hotels but “never the best hotels, of course. Second-rate hotels” (O’Neill 79). The Tyrones’ yearly return to their summer house creates both the sensation that they are trapped in it and that...