Long Days Journey Into Night

20 Pages 5022 Words

morphine addiction. She describes the fog as an analgesic: “I really love fog. . . . It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more” (98). Elsewhere, Edmund likens the morphine-induced barrier of sub-consciousness around his mother to fog: “The hardest thing to take is the blank wall she builds around her. Or it’s more like a bank of fog in which she hides and loses herself” (139). This barrier thickens as the play progresses, and Frederic Carpenter notes that as the day fades, Mary “gradually regresses from the sunlight world of reality to the fog-bound world of dope and dreams” (Carpenter 153).

There are indicators besides the fog that reveal the Tyrones’ isolation from the larger world. O’Neill’s vision of isolation is so comprehensive that it denies even the existence of God: after Tyrone’s desperate prayers failed to save Mary from a regression into addiction, Edmund quotes from Nietzsche, “God is dead: of His pity for man hath God died” (78). Besides the four Tyrones, only one other character ever appears onstage--Cathleen, the stupid servant girl. Few other personalities are even mentioned, and of these none--from William Shakespeare to the wily tenant Shaughnessy--is admired by all characters. (The one possible exception is the great actor Edwin Booth, who is mentioned once, briefly, only to be quoted as saying that Tyrone was a better actor than he.)



At one point, a neighbor family, the Chatfields, are briefly mentioned; and though they are dismissed by Mary as “big frogs in a small puddle” (43), she wistfully muses that “the Chatfields and people like them stand for something. I mean they have decent, presentable homes they don’t have to be ashamed of. They have friends who entertain them and whom they entertain. They’re not cut off from everyone”...