A Worm in the Wood: The Father-Son Relationship in the Plays of Sam Shepard

Abstract

In his illuminating essay "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography," Georges Gusdorf observes that "Confession, an attempt at remembering, is at the same time a searching for a hidden treasure, for a last delivering word, redeeming in the final appeal a destiny that doubted its own value. For the one who takes up the venture it is a matter of concluding a peace treaty and a new alliance with himself and with the world." Implicit in Gusdorf's essay on autobiography is the notion that confessional literature is an attempt to heal a basic breach between the self and the other. Nowhere is this search for redemption more obvious than in the late work of America's most confessional dramatist, Eugene O'Neill. We know from his wife, Carlotta, that the writing of his autobiographical family play, Long Day's Journey into Night, in June 1939 was "a thing that haunted him. He was bedeviled into writing it … He had to get it out of his system, he had to forgive whatever it was that caused this tragedy between himself and his mother and father.”