The artist’s self-reflection: A pluralistic interpretation of the artist-characters in Eugene O’Neill’s plays

Abstract

Abstract There are various artist-characters in many of O’Neill’s plays, which – if interpreted in a new way – can be regarded as dramatic embodiment of multi-level significance. With their expressed awareness of being artists, they occasionally go beyond the narrow confines of O’Neill’s personal life experiences to reveal an implicit re-examination of the author’s own theatrical methods. In O’Neill plays poets are usually of symbolic significance in contrast to commercially motivated society. The novelist characters convey O’Neill’s tendency to combine novel and drama; they also represent the difficulties O’Neill experiences in such an endeavor. The characters involved with drama production reveal O’Neill’s ideas on the relationship between drama writing and production. The analysis attempts to explore the pluralistic space of interpretation of O’Neill’s artist-characters so that a more perceptive comprehension of his plays can be achieved.