Long Days Journey Into Night

The first 200 words of this essay...

Explore the significance of the past in the play "Long Day's Journey

Into Night" by Eugene O'Neill

At the very start of Long Day's Journey Into Night, O'Neill sets the scene for the theme of the past being integral to the play directly with the dedication to the love and tenderness of his wife - "... which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play - write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all of the four haunted Tyrones." This admittance that the play was written as a sort of autobiography, a partial re- telling of O'Neill's personal history, means that it seems almost intrinsically connected to the past right from the beginning, the intimation from the author being that he wrote it as a form of catharsis in order to deal with the real events from his own life. Consequently the theme of the past is introduced before even the first Act has begun. The idea that he is 'facing his dead' is a particularly apt one as at the time of writing the play, the people upon whom its characters are