Eugene O'Neill is deservedly regarded as an architect of contemporary American drama, who was desperately trying to find an alternative to dead God and materialistic civilization in the early 20th century. O'Neill's posthumous work, Long Day's Journey Into Night is an autobiographical work which describes his life-long obsession with 'home' and his painful memory about his own family. In this work, O'Neill depicts the tragic situation of a family, which represents the human alienation and people's desperate dependancy on 'illusion' in an attempt to escape from tragic reality.
All the characters in the work are prepossessed with his past memories and seek for a way out from their present agonies and frustration. This paper aims to investigate O'Neill's tragic view on life and people's effort to flee from their tragic situation as reflected in Long Day's Journey Into Night.
In this autobiographical work, O'Neill laments the situation of people who are facing unavoidable power of destiny. Each person of the family has his or her own desolate past and experience, which are inter-wined with each other with no hope of reconciliation. They blame each other for causing their own sufferings and engage in 'hopeless hope' in a false belief that they could find a haven.
Tyron puts money before everything, Mary absorbs herself in drug, and Jamie becomes a sarcastic pessimist. They really wish to escape from their delusion but they have to admit their final destination---self-destruction through their journey into night. But O'Neill is not absolutely pessimistic. Edmond, who is O'Neill himself, shows a slight possibility to find a way to the light through a sudden, mysterious awareness of hope.
In Long Day's Journey into Night, O'Neill shows how he sees man's ontological loneliness and tragedy but he also asserts that life is by no means totally meaningless and hopeless to live.