from plays by
Eugene O’Neill

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Days without End

Long Day’s Journey into Night

Category:

drama

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Days without End

Copyright © 1934 by Eugene O’Neill

Note (Hal’s):
This play employs an odd dramatic device: the central character, John Loving, is played by two actors; “Loving” wears a mask resembling John’s face. When alone, they debate each other; in conversation with others, they may interrupt each other.

— end note

Act One

Plot for a Novel

John:
[...] You know I’m doing it to try and explain to myself, as well as to her.

Loving:
To excuse yourself to yourself, you mean! To lie and escape admitting the obvious natural reason for—

John:
You lie! I want to get at the real truth and understand what was behind—what evil spirit of hate possessed me to make me—

Loving:
So it’s come back to that again, eh? Your old familiar nightmare! You poor, damned superstitious fool! I tell you again what I have always told you: There is nothing—nothing to hope for, nothing to fear—neither devils nor gods—nothing at all!

Father Baird:
Why do you run and hide from Him, as from an enemy? Take care. There comes a time in every man’s life when he must have his God for friend, or he has no friend at all, not even himself.

Topics:

Friendship

Gods

Act Three

Plot for a Novel

(Continued)
Scene I

Loving:
But he was afraid to face death. He was still too religious-minded, you see, to accept the one beautiful, comforting truth of life: that death is final release, the warm, dark peace of annihilation.

Father Baird:
I cannot see the beauty and comfort.

Topic:

Death

Loving:
[...] He was never courageous enough to face what he really knew was true, that there is no truth for men, that human life is unimportant and meaningless.

Father Baird:
[...] One may not give one’s soul to a devil of hate—and remain forever scatheless.

Topic:

Hate

Scene II

John:
I listen to people talking about this universal breakdown we are in and I marvel at their stupid cowardice. It is so obvious that they deliberately cheat themselves because their fear of change won’t let them face the truth. They don’t want to understand what has happened to them. All they want is to start the merry-go-round of blind greed all over again. They no longer know what they want this country to be, what they want it to become, where they want it to go. It has lost all meaning for them except as a pig-wallow. And so their lives as citizens have no beginnings, no ends. They have lost the ideal of the Land of the Free. Freedom demands initiative, courage, the need to decide what life must mean to oneself. To them, that is terror. They explain away their spiritual cowardice by whining that the time for individualism is past, when it is their courage to possess their own souls which is dead—and stinking! No, they don’t want to be free. Slavery means security—of a kind, the only kind they have courage for. It means they need not think. They have only to obey orders from owners who are, in turn, their slaves!

Loving:
But I’m denouncing from my old soap box again. It’s all silly twaddle, of course. Freedom was merely our romantic delusion. We know better now. We know we are all the slaves of meaningless chance—electricity or something, which whirls us—on to Hercules!

Topic:

Freedom

text checked (see note) Aug 2006

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Long Day’s Journey into Night

Copyright © as an unpublished work, 1955, by Carlotta Monterey O’Neill
Copyright © 1955 by Carlotta Monterey O’Neill

Act Four

Edmund:
[...] Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.

Don’t look at me as if I’d gone nutty. I’m talking sense. Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?

Edmund:
[...] You can’t accuse me of not knowing Shakespeare. Didn’t I win five dollars from you once when you bet me I couldn’t learn a leading part of his in a week, as you used to do in stock in the old days. I learned Macbeth and recited it letter perfect, with you giving me the cues.

Tyrone:
That’s true. So you did.

It was a terrible ordeal, I remember, hearing you murder the lines. I kept wishing I’d paid over the bet without making you prove it.

Edmund:
[...] It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!

Tyrone:
Yes, there’s the makings of a poet in you all right. But that’s morbid craziness about not being wanted and loving death.

Edmund:
The makings of a poet. No, I’m afraid I’m like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn’t even got the makings. He’s got only the habit. I couldn’t touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That’s the best I’ll ever do.

Mary:
Something I need terribly. I remember when I had it I was never lonely nor afraid. I can’t have lost it forever, I would die if I thought that. Because then there would be no hope.

text checked (see note) Feb 2005

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