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Eugene O'Neill's major dramas are built on the pervasive theme of illusion
versus reality, with variations here and there. O'Neill stresses, in his
dramas, the necessity for individuals to have some illusions to live
by, for, he thinks, mankind cannot bear too much of reality. His protagonists
are often split personalities who wear masks, consume liquor, utter
soliloquies, and are obsessed with the subconscious drivers and impulses that lead them
to adopt tragic roles. They are mostly in search of their identity and are
alternately tossed between illusion and reality, clinging sometimes to illusion, but
ultimately forced to come to grips with reality. O'Neill shows us that the background
of conflicting tides in the soul is more real, universal, and more decisive
than the partial individuality of men and women. The conscious will plays very
little part in their lives, and all their aspirations to belong to something nobler
and higher prove ultimately illusory. The long gallery of portraits spells out
O'Neill's own intellectual and spiritual biography at different stages of his life.
Perhaps, it would not be an exaggeration to observe that O'Neill himself is the hero of
his important dramas and that the problem of illusion and reality is, in fact,
a manifestation of his own quest for identity and faith.
The essence of O'Neill's dramatic output is the grim futility of
human existence, cursed by alienation from self, society, and the
source-of-all-life, and made bearable only by illusion. The essential O'Neill's hero can
be characterized as a rebel, a dreamer, an idealist, and an individualist,
challenging established modes and living in an illusory world of his own. His
protagonists' attitude towards life is sardonic, sneering, cynical, romantic, full of pride,
and aloofness—in short, the epitome of the author's own self-portrait. They
are preoccupied in a voyage to self-discovery and are seen engaged in a pursuit
of meaning and significance in a world without God and religion. They range
from `landlocked' Mayo (Beyond the Horizon), the tubercular press reporter
Stephen Murrey (The Straw), semi-incestuous Eben Cabbot
(Desire under the Elms), the possessive Michael Cape
(Welded), the defeated idealist Dion Anthony
(The Great God Brown), the suicidal Reuben Light
(Dynamo), the rebellious adolescent Richard Miller
(Ah, Wilderness!), the pipe dreamer Larry Slade
(The Iceman Cometh), and finally the spokesman of the fog people Edmund Tyrone
(Long Day's Journey into Night). Their restless quest for new absolutes arises from
perpetual dissatisfaction with material and commercial values. In one of his early
poems, O'Neill adumbrates his vision, as he compares his soul to a submarine and
his aspirations to torpedo directed towards "the grimy galleons of
commerce" (Brustein 1964, 328). |
