Ali

EDMUND TYRONE

Victim In Long Day's Journey into Night, one could easily characterize Edmund as a victim. Bad stuff just happens to him. His painful birth caused his mom to get hooked on morphine. Worry over his tuberculosis causes her to get hooked again. His dad is so penny-pinching that he wants to pack Edmund off to a second rate sanatorium to recover from his illness. On top of all that, his brother admits that part of him wishes Edmund were dead. The fact is: Edmund is a different kind of character than the other Tyrones. Unlike them, he is relatively blameless. The Peacekeeper

Edmund is also the peacekeeper of the house. He's the glue that keeps this family from falling apart. Edmund can normally be found trying to silence one of his angry, accusative family members. His verbal smackdowns are lovingly administered in the hope of avoiding worse conflict. Edmund tends to say things like – "Cut it out, Papa!" (2.2.43) and even "Mama! For God's sake, stop talking" (2.2.15). Notice that these statements come in the span of just 28 lines. In the Tyrone household, a peacekeeper stays busy. MARY CAVAN TYRONE Roots of Addiction

Act I starts off with a bright ray of hope – this time Mary has really kicked morphine. O'Neill, in typical O'Neill fashion, doesn't wait long to beat the drums of doom. By the time Act II rolls around, Mary is already descending the stairs bright-eyed from a hit of morphine. A heartbroken James asks, "For the love of God, why couldn't you have the strength to keep on?" (2.1.125) That's a very good question Mr. Tyrone. Let us examine. First, what are the causes of Mary's addiction? Edmund seems to get the blame most of the time, simply for being born. The birth was evidently quite painful for Mary. We have a sneaky suspicion that this pain wasn't just physical. Mary says that, before Edmund was born, there wasn't "a nerve in [her] body" (2.2.102). But why did Edmund's birth shatter Mary's nerves so badly? What did she fear?

The source of Mary's fear isn't much of a mystery when she says things like "I knew I'd proved by the way I'd left Eugene that I wasn't worthy to have another baby, and that God would punish me if I did" (2.2.105). Mary feels extremely guilty over the death of her second son. She thinks that, if she'd been there, she could've stopped little Jamie from giving Eugene that lethal case of measles Later Causes

What causes Mary to start using morphine again in Act II? Could it be physical? She does have rheumatoid arthritis, which causes constant pain, though there are other painkillers she could take. There are also the physically addictive properties of morphine to consider. The withdrawal is hideously painful, but then Mary has just gotten out of rehab. Isn't she past the hard part? Maybe not. Maybe the really hard part for Mary is returning to normal life. But what stresses cause her to relapse? Let's investigate. First there's poor Edmund's illness. Once again he seems to help push his mom toward drugs. Just like with his birth, however, it's not his fault. (This guy can't win.) He has consumption (tuberculosis). Mary's father died of the same thing. So, she gets freaked out and turns to morphine for comfort. You can tell how much Edmund fears this scenario when he says, "I want you to promise me that even if it should turn out to be something worse, […] you'll keep on taking care of yourself" (1.1.224). Mary gives him her word of honor. Unfortunately, her word is just no good where morphine is concerned. Mary's Choices

With all of the above in mind, (Eugene's death, Edmund's birth, cheap doctors, Edmund's illness, Mary's loneliness, the family's suspicion) doesn't the choice to use morphine still fall on Mary? The fact is that Mrs. Tyrone likes to blame others – this might be her greatest weakness. She's so good at coming up with excuses, that she very rarely has to face the fact that ultimately it's her decision. No one else is making her use the drug. In fact everyone around her is trying desperately to get her to stop. Tragically, on this very long day, she's just not ready. JAMES TYRONE

The first thing we notice about James is that he's actually pretty adorable. He's naïve and sentimental, but he's also charmingly misanthropic and very temperamental. James is really like a big old twelve-year-old: grumpy and quick to fight, but a teddy bear on the inside.

James's first instinct is to argue, like when Jamie pokes fun at his snoring and James snaps back: "If it takes my snoring to make you remember Shakespeare instead of the dope sheet on ponies!" (1.1.40) Still, he's quick to settle down again when his wife Mary tells him not to be so "touchy," and he's downright after-school special when he talks about his dear old mother, wiping tears from his eyes: "A fine, brave, sweet woman. There never was a braver or finer" (4.1.135). But this fighting instinct can be a major problem. Check out Jamie's "Character Analysis" for more on this, but James is constantly jumping down his elder son's throat, accusing him of being disrespectful and lazy. If you can find a passage in the play in which both Jamie and James are present, it's almost a guarantee that they're fighting. The Alcoholic

The word "whiskey" comes from the Gaelic for "water of life." James would seem to agree with his Irish ancestors. He admits that he used to give whiskey to his sons as medicine when they were children. We even see him give it to Edmund as a tonic for his tuberculosis. Indeed he's so fond of the stuff that it's one of the very few things on which he'll actually spend money The Penny-Pincher

What evidence is there that James is a miser? Oh, where to begin? There's the low wages James insists on paying his chauffeur, who makes up for his bad pay by cheating the family on car repair bills. There's the shabby house, in which "everything [is] done in the cheapest way" (1.1.94). James is too miserly to even turn on the lights at night.

Jamie Jamie is probably the character we know the least – but he would want it that way. He's cynical, bitter, arrogant, and often mean. He also has some positive sides, though; Jamie is perceptive, speaks his mind, and is often more sensitive than he acts. (If you want to get to know Jamie better, read O'Neill's Moon for the Misbegotten. Jamie is the star of that one.) So, Jamie isn't all together unlikable. But, basically everything he does is ambiguous: he could be either a cynical, arrogant man who is mistreated by his parents or an embittered man hell-bent on destroying the happiness of those around him. How far back do we have to go to understand the ambiguity of Jamie's character? The answer is: way back. He's the eldest of the Tyrone children, and was around when baby Eugene died. Or was it murder? Mary seems certain that Jamie intentionally infected

young Eugene with measles. But can we trust Mary? She's not the most reliable source of familial detail. Still, we can ask: was Eugene's death the result of a childish accident or murderous jealousy

Themes GUILT AND BLAME

The characters in Long Day's Journey are absolutely obsessed with thinking over the past and either feeling guilty about what they've done, or blaming someone else for all the problems they face. Once one of the children dies at a young age and the mother becomes addicted to morphine, everyone keeps worrying about whether they should have had another kid, who was responsible for the baby's death, why the mother became addicted to morphine, and generally how they or others have failed as good mothers, fathers, sons, and brother SUFFERING At the most basic level, Long Day's Journey Into Night is a play about people who are suffering. The characters have basically nothing to do, as the adult sons aren't working, the father is in his off-season, and the mother doesn't work at all. They tend to sit around, argue, and suffer the pain of old wounds and dark prospects for the future. One son has consumption to worry about, and the mother is addicted to morphine, but these problems radiate to the father and other son as well, as they suffer from the consequences too. Everyone's bogged down in depressive thinking about the way things used to be (either good or bad) and their (probably awful) future.

DRUGS AND ALCOHOL In Long Day's Journey Into Night, the Tyrone family's past and present have been so dire that normal coping mechanisms (family love, togetherness, etc.) can't keep up. So what do they turn to for relief? Alcohol and drugs. These forms of retreat might numb the pain, but they also bring their own problems – Mary's constant zoning out and Jamie's inability to hold down a job, to name two examples. There's also a vicious cycle involved in all of this: Mary takes drugs and the Tyrone men drink to escape, but they also feel bad about doing so, leading them to snipe at one another even more maliciously.

FATE AND FREE WILL One of the basic tensions underlying Long Day's Journey is the conflict between fate and free will. All the characters want to change their lives, but at the same time, they can't get this depressing fatalism out of their heads. The play's matriarch sums it up well when she says, "None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things" (2.1.76). We should point out that the idea of fate is different here than in a Greek tragedy. The characters aren't pawns of the gods. In Long Day's Journey Into Night, the word "fate" is short hand for family history and past mistakes. Each

character struggles against the tides of the past. Even though they aren't battling divine will, they are all in least in some way shaped by forces that are out of their control.