The Recesses of the Unconscious in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night

Abstract

In Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, four members of the Tyrone family make some choices about their careers and family life. It is apparent that the adverse outcomes of Tyrones’ respective decisions that they have reached hold sway and torment the rest of their lives. Although James Tyrone, the head of the family, announces his credo as keeping his family together and healthy, his two sons Jamie and Edmund and his wife Mary suffer from different types of addiction, from not being able to position themselves in a respectable environment and to develop healthy relationships. The play takes place on a single day, starting from 8.30 in the morning to midnight, which is quite parallel with the descending mood of the characters and events. Each of these characters’ tragedies can be traced not only in their seemingly conscious choices but in their collective unconscious which can be anatomized with some Lacanian conceptual backcloths. This paper forms its basis on discovering the ulterior motives of the characters’ actions and the way they speak language by scrutinizing their unconscious, which reveals itself in a structure of language in Lacanian outlook. Thus, this study aims to create a hermeneutical frame by laying the underlying reasons for why the Tyrone family suffer, which can be traced in how these family members fail to identify themselves with the symbolic father which is a functional metaphor for rules and regulations in the society and by highlighting what kind of master signifiers the Tyrone family keep using to substitute the Name-of-the-Father.