A

Project on

LONG DAYS JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

[ Submitted as partial requirement for B.A.LL.B. (Hons.) 5 year Integrated course]

Submitted on:-13 May 2023

Submitted By :- Submitted To :-

Sahaj Singh Naruka Dr. Priyanka Khetan

Roll No. 86 Faculty: English

Semester – IV B

UNIVERSITY FIVE YEAR LAW COLLEGE

UNIVERSITY Of RAJASTHAN

JAIPUR

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 CERTIFICATE

Dr. Priyanka Khetan Date: 13/05/2023

(Faculty)

University Five Year Law College

This is to certify that Sahaj Singh Naruka of IV Semester of University Five Year Law
College, University of Rajasthan has carried out the project entitled LONG DAYS JOURNEY
INTO NIGHT under my supervision and guidance. It is an investigation report of a minor
project. The student has completed research work in my stipulated time and according to the
norms prescribed for the purpose.

Supervisor

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 DECLARATION

I, Sahaj Singh Naruka, hereby declare that this project titled LONG DAYS JOURNEY INTO
NIGHT is based on the original research work carried out by me under the guidance and
supervision of Dr. Priyanka Khetan.

The interpretations put forth are based on my reading and understanding of the original texts,
The books, articles and the websites etc. which have been relied upon by me have been duly
acknowledged at the respective places in the text.

For the present project which I am submitting to the university, no degree or diploma has
been conferred on me before, either in this or in any other university.

Date: 13/05/2023 Signature

Sahaj Singh Naruka

Roll no. 86

Semester: IV B

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I have written this project LONG DAYS JOURNEY INTO NIGHT under the supervision of
Dr. Priyanka Khetan, faculty, University Five Year Law College, University of Rajasthan,
Jaipur. His Valuable suggestions herein have not only helped me immensely in making this
work but also in developing an analytical approach this work.

I found no words to express my sense of gratitude for Director Dr. Akhil Kumar , Deputy
Director Dr. Sandeep Singh for constant encouragement at every step.

I am extremely grateful to librarian and library staff of the college for the support and
cooperation extended by them from time to time.

Sahaj Singh Naruka

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 TABLE OF CONTENT

SR. NO. PARTICULARS

1 INTRODUCTION

2 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

3 SUMMARY OF PLAY

4 CONCLUSION

5 BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER-1
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 INTRODUCTION
Long Day's Journey Into Night
This autobiographical play depicts one long, summer day in the life of the fictional Tyrone
family, a dysfunctional household based on O’Neill’s immediate family during his early
years. James Tyrone is a vain actor and penny pincher, as was O’Neill’s father James. Mary
Tyrone struggles with a morphine addiction, as did his mother Ellen. The fictional son Jamie
Tyrone is an alcoholic, as was O’Neill’s brother Jamie. And the Tyrones’ younger son
Edmund is deathly ill with tuberculosis. O’Neill himself suffered and recovered from a mild
case of tuberculosis. It’s a story of love, hate, betrayal, addiction, blame, and the fragility of
family bonds—particularly between fathers and sons. O’Neill took two years to write it,
essentially reliving his own painful past as he wrote about it. In the play, he bares his soul and
essentially tells the world what it was like to grow up in his own house. No wonder he called
it a “play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood.”
In order to spare his family from pain, O’Neill requested that the play not be published until
25 years after he died. In 1956, three years after O’Neill’s death, his widow Carlotta allowed
the play to be published since the immediate family had predeceased the playwright. It’s an
August morning at the summer home of James and Mary Tyrone. James (also called Tyrone)
is an aging actor, and even though he has done well financially, he’s a miser. Mary has
recently returned from a sanatorium for her addiction to morphine. Their older son Jamie is
out of a job and has moved back home for the summer. Their younger son Edmund is very ill.
Breakfast has just ended, and a day of discord is just beginning. It’s obvious that Mary has
started taking morphine again. It’s also clear that Edmund has tuberculosis, but the men try to
shield Mary from the truth, making her think that Edmund has a bad cold. Jamie accuses
Tyrone of sending Edmund to a cheap and terrible doctor and suggests that Edmund would be
in better health if Tyrone weren’t so cheap. As the day goes on, a thick fog surrounds the
house. Secrets are revealed and old emotional wounds are reopened.
It seems that Tyrone caused Mary’s morphine addiction when he refused to pay for a good
doctor to treat Mary’s pain after Edmund’s birth. Mary refuses to believe that she’s an addict,
even as she continues to take morphine just to get through the day. The three men drink
heavily as the hours pass…to the point where Tyrone and Jamie are barely functioning as
night settles in. The literal fog outside the house and the metaphorical fog of addiction have
overtaken the family.
As the Tyrones refight their old battles and repeat the same arguments, it’s pretty apparent
that this day is not all that different from the many other days in the family’s life. They relive
old hurts and blame each other for their failures. By the end of the play, the audience is left to
wonder: What happens to us when we are unable to let go of the past? What happens to a
family that lives in denial of its problems? Is it ever okay to lie to someone to spare their
feelings? What is it like to feel lost without any hope?1

1
https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/longdays

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 CHAPTER-2
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eugene O’Neill wrote plays about regular people—people like him, like people he knew—
sailors, bartenders, and troubled families—all dealing with life’s everyday hardships. He also
experimented with dramatic composition and staging, and explored serious social themes and
human psyches, including his own. According to biographer Barrett Clark, O’Neill was an
artist who used the theater “as a medium for the expression of his feelings and his ideas on
life.” And by doing so, O’Neill turned an important page in the “script” and became forever
known as the “father of American theater.”
At the time Eugene O’Neill’s first play was produced in 1916, there really wasn’t much
original or serious work being performed on America’s stages. Sure, occasionally people
went to see a Shakespearean play, but mostly they bought tickets to the popular melodrama
that was filled with overacting and exaggerated emotion—where the story and situation were
important and the characters were not. They were also enjoying vaudeville—variety shows
featuring magicians, animal tricks, acrobats, and song-and-dance teams.
Eugene O’Neill said that his goal was “to get an audience to leave the theatre with an exultant
feeling from seeing somebody on stage facing life, fighting against the eternal odds, not
conquering but perhaps inevitably being conquered. The individual life is made significant
just by the struggle.” Struggle was a familiar subject to O’Neill.
Eugene O’Neill was born in 1888 in a New York City hotel right on Broadway. His father
was a famous traveling actor who made his living playing the lead role in the melodramatic
play, The Count of Monte Cristo. The young Eugene spent a lot of time on the road and
backstage, learning about theater (and becoming disillusioned with the light, frothy plays that
made his father’s career). He felt that his father had wasted his talent by choosing commercial
success over artistic excellence—a point that O’Neill addressed later in Long Day’s Journey
Into Night.
He attended college for a short time, then traveled, and took up odd jobs. He worked on a
cattle boat, prospected for gold, and spent a lot of time with artists. Many of these
experiences would eventually influence his work, especially his early short plays about the
sea.
In 1912, O’Neill got tuberculosis. During his recovery in a sanitarium, he read the great
playwrights August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, and Henrik Ibsen. Their plays were highly
realistic and inspired O’Neill to write about characters facing impossible odds. O’Neill
disliked popular plays that went for cheap laughs and portrayed shallow emotions. In fact, he
referred to Broadway as a “show shop,” a place where he felt it was easy to find such
entertainment. His plays were going to be poetically beautiful and emotionally honest.
O’Neill was awarded four Pulitzer Prizes and is still the only American playwright ever to
receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died on November 27, 1953.2

2
https://www.supersummary.com/long-day-s-journey-into-night

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 CHAPTER-3
SUMMARY OF PLAY
It is morning in the Tyrones’ summer home when the play begins. James Tyrone—an aging
matinee star—is spending time with his wife, Mary, who has recently returned from a
sanatorium. James expresses his happiness at Mary being back and encourages her to “keep
up the good work.” Mary appears restless, admitting she got little sleep the night before
because of a nearby foghorn that blared until morning.
Before long, James and Mary’s eldest son, Jamie, enters. He’s thirty-three and good-looking
but “lacks his father’s vitality,” since “the signs of premature disintegration are on him.” His
little brother, Edmund, also enters. He is ten years younger, thinner, and looks sickly. Once
the two brothers settle in, the family bickers in a way that fluctuates between playfulness and
flat-out scorn, especially when James accuses his sons of making fun of him behind his back.
After arguing, Edmund gets up and leaves the room, exhausted by the way his father berates
him and Jamie for having no work ethic. After he leaves, Mary says that James should go
easy on Edmund, since the young man has a “summer cold.” “It’s not just a cold he’s got,”
Jamie interjects. “The Kid is damned sick.” Spinning to face him, Mary responds, “Why do
you say that? It is just a cold! Anyone can tell that! You always imagine things!”
Jumping in, James suggests Mary shouldn’t worry, maintaining that Jamie simply meant that
Edmund might have a “touch of something else, too, which makes his cold worse.” He then
says Doctor Hardy thinks Edmund might have caught “malarial fever” from working in “the
tropics,” but Mary disregards this, saying Doctor Hardy is unreliable because he’s cheap.
When Mary leaves, James chastises Jamie for talking about Edmund’s health in front of her,
saying this is the one topic he should avoid in her presence. The two men then admit to one
another that they think Edmund has consumption, at which point Jamie suggests that his little
brother wouldn’t ever have gotten this sick if James had sent him to a “real doctor” instead of
saving money by using Doctor Hardy. Defensively, James upholds that Hardy is a perfectly
respectable doctor, though he admits to wanting to avoid expensive “society doctors.” He
then says Jamie doesn’t know the value of a dollar, lampooning him for leading the life of a
wannabe actor on Broadway, where Jamie spends his time drinking and visiting whores. He
also accuses Jamie of teaching Edmund his wicked ways, saying the poor boy doesn’t have
the “constitution” to lead the kind of life Jamie has taught him. Nevertheless, they agree that
Edmund’s wide-ranging adventures as a sailor have done him no good.
James also laments that Edmund is sick, since it’s terrible timing for Mary, who had “control
of her nerves” before he became ill. In response, Jamie tells his father that he heard Mary get
up in the middle of the night and retreat into the guestroom. He begins to note that this has
always been a “sign,” but before he can finish James interrupts to insist that Mary just got up
to escape his snoring. They then argue about who’s to blame for Mary’s addiction, with Jamie
suggesting that the “cheap quack” who treated Mary after Edmund was born was perhaps
responsible for her dependency. As his father refutes this point, though, they quickly change
the subject because Mary enters the room. In order to avoid her, they go outside to trim the
hedges.
At this point, Edmund comes into the parlor and talks to his mother, who criticizes her
husband for never providing the family with a permanent home. Since James was a famous

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actor, the family was constantly traveling from one place to the next and living in second-rate
hotels. According to Mary, this is why Jamie and Edmund were never able to meet
respectable women—after all, they didn’t have a presentable home where they could entertain
people. As for herself, she has always felt lonely and untethered because of this lifestyle, so
much that she deeply misses her days as a young girl in a convent, when she was studying to
be a nun or a concert pianist.
During this conversation, Edmund makes references to Mary’s addiction, though she tries to
stop him from speaking about the matter and says it “makes it so much harder” to live “in this
atmosphere of constant suspicion.” Nevertheless, Edmund says he heard her go into the spare
room the previous night. And though she shames him for suspecting, she also admits she
understands why he thinks she might relapse. “How can any one of us forget?” she asks.
Changing the subject, she tells Edmund he should go outside because it’ll be good for his
health. When he leaves, she sits nervously and fidgets with her hands.
That afternoon, Edmund sits in the parlor and has a glass of whiskey with Jamie. Together,
they wait for lunch as their father talks outside with a passing neighbor. Meanwhile, Mary
comes downstairs, and it’s immediately clear she has taken morphine. Jamie sees this right
away, but it takes Edmund longer, especially since Mary won’t look him in the eye. After a
moment, she exits, and James finally comes in, has a drink of whiskey (along with his sons),
and claims whiskey in “moderation” is healthy, even for a sick person like Edmund. At this
point, Mary reenters and goes on a long rant, which she delivers with a sense of distance that
James recognizes as a sign of relapse. Then, seeing Edmund’s glass on the table, she
worriedly tells him he shouldn’t drink, asking if he remembers her own father, who had
consumption but wouldn’t stop drinking and, as a result, died an early death.
Shortly thereafter, James admits he feels like a “fool” for having believed in Mary, and
though she pretends to not understand what he’s talking about, she eventually says, “I tried so
hard!” In response, James simply says, “Never mind. It’s no use now.” This dynamic
continues throughout lunch, with Mary rambling on in a removed manner and frequently
casting blame on James for never providing her with a proper home. In keeping with this, she
suggests that James is a cheapskate who, despite his riches, fears ending up in the poorhouse.
Eventually, the telephone rings and James answers it, since he’s expecting a call from Hardy,
who has news about Edmund’s condition. When returns, he only says that Hardy wanted to
make sure Edmund sees him that afternoon. At this point, Mary announces she must go
upstairs, and it’s obvious that she wants to take more morphine. Resigned to this reality,
James tells her to go right ahead. Then, when she’s gone, Edmund tries to convince his father
and brother that they shouldn’t give up on Mary, but they tell him there’s no use trying to
intervene now that she has relapsed. Nevertheless, Edmund is undeterred and goes upstairs to
reason with her. When he leaves, James tells Jamie that Doctor Hardy informed him that
Edmund does indeed have consumption and that he’ll have to go to a sanatorium. He then
asks his son to accompany Edmund to the doctor’s, but to refrain from using the excursion as
an excuse to get drunk.
When Mary comes downstairs again, she looks even more “detached.” Jamie leaves, and
James tries to convince Mary to get out of the house, but she says she doesn’t like being
driven around. When Edmund comes downstairs, James gives him money and tells him not to
share the cash with Jamie, who will only spend it on alcohol. He then departs. Before

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Edmund also leaves, he pleads with Mary to stop taking morphine, but she pretends she
doesn’t know what he’s talking about. At the same time, she tells him she understands why he
doesn’t believe her. Defeated, he exits, leaving her alone.
That evening, Mary sits in the parlor with Cathleen, a housekeeper. Giving Cathleen drinks
of James’s whiskey, she speaks nostalgically about the past, telling the young woman about
her life in the convent and how good she was at piano. She had decided to become a nun, she
explains, but then she went to one of James’s shows and was star-struck by him. That same
night, she went to his dressing room, and they fell in love. Since then, she has been traveling
with him.
Eventually, James and Edmund come home, and Mary speaks disparagingly about Jamie,
who’s out drinking because Edmund gave him some money. Because Mary’s high, she can’t
help rambling about the past, often blaming James and Jamie for her troubles. She even talks
about Eugene, the child she had after Jamie who, not long after he was born, died of measles.
This never would have happened, Mary suggests, if James hadn’t asked her to come on the
road with him and leave Jamie with her mother. If Mary herself had stayed home, she
upholds, Jamie wouldn’t have been allowed to go into Eugene’s room when he had measles,
and so the baby wouldn’t have been infected. Going on, she says that the cheap doctor James
hired to treat her when she gave birth to Edmund is to blame for her morphine habit. This is
because Edmund’s birth was complicated and messy, and the doctor didn’t know how to
properly tend to Mary, so he gave her morphine. As she says these terrible things, Eugene and
James come in and out of the room, wanting to avoid her words.
Around midnight, James sits alone in the parlor. He’s extremely drunk and playing cards with
himself when Edmund, also thoroughly intoxicated, enters. In an overly sentimental
monologue, James tells his son about the highlights of his acting career, admitting that he
regrets chasing commercial success at the expense of artistic fulfillment. In turn, Edmund
tells his father the high points of his own career as a sailor, talking about the freedom he finds
in the loneliness of the ocean. When they hear Jamie stumbling into the house, James decides
to wait on the side porch to avoid an argument. As such, Jamie and Edmund have a one-on-
one conversation in which Jamie scolds his younger brother for drinking with consumption,
then lightens up and lets him continue. At one point, Jamie insults Mary’s honor by talking
about her addiction, and Edmund punches him in the face. Jamie readily accepts his mistake
and thanks his brother for setting him straight. Before long, he slips into a drunken sleep, and
James returns.
When Jamie wakes up again, the three Tyrones pour themselves whiskey and are about to
toast when Mary appears in the doorway holding her wedding dress with a distant look on
her face. Forgetting their drinks, they watch as she walks around without seeming to notice
them, talking all the while as if she’s a younger version of herself. Indeed, she speaks as if
she’s still in the convent, and says she’s looking for something, though she can’t remember
what. Going on distractedly, she talks about her relationship with one of the nuns, and then
she sits down—facing the audience—and stares off into the distance as her drunken family
members sit uncomfortably nearby.3

https://www.kennedy-center.org

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 CHAPTER-4
CONCLUSION
Long Day's Journey into Night is undoubtedly a tragedy--it leaves the audience with a sense
of catharsis, or emotional rebirth through the viewing of powerful events, and it depicts the
fall of something that was once great. The play focuses on the Tyrone family, whose once-
close family has deteriorated over the years, for a number of reasons: Mary's drug addiction,
Tyrone Jamie, and Edmund's alcoholism, Tyrone's stinginess, the boys' lax attitude toward
work and money, and a variety of other factors. As the play is set, the parents are aging, and
while they always hoped that their sons would achieve great things, that hope is beginning to
be replaced by a resigned despair.
The play is largely autobiographical; it resembles O'Neill's life in many aspects. O'Neill
himself appears in the play in the character of Edmund, the younger son who, like O'Neill,
suffers from consumption. Indeed, some of the parallels between this play and O'Neill's life
are striking. Like Tyrone, O'Neill's father was an Irish Catholic, an alcoholic, and a Broadway
actor. Like Mary, O'Neill's mother was a morphine addict, and she became so around the time
O'Neill was born. Like Jamie, O'Neill's older brother did not take life seriously, choosing to
live a life of whores, alcohol, and the fast-paced reckless life of Broadway. Finally, O'Neill
had an older brother named Edmund who died in infancy; in this play, Edmund has an older
brother named Eugene who died in infancy.
The play, published posthumously, represents O'Neill's last words to the literary world. It is
important to note that his play is not condemning in nature; no one character is meant to be
viewed as particularly worse than any other. This is one of the play's great strengths; it is fair
and unbiased, and it shows that many character flaws can be seen as positives when viewed
in a different light. Thus, Long Day's Journey into Night invests heavily in the politics of
language. It is a world in which there is a large weight placed on the weakness of "stinginess"
versus the virtue of "prudence."
The play also creates a world in which communication has broken down. One of the great
conflicts in the play is the characters' uncanny inability to communicate despite their constant
fighting. For instance, the men often fight amongst themselves over Mary's addiction, but no
one is willing to confront her directly. Instead, they allow her to lie to herself about her own
addiction and about Edmund's illness. Edmund and Jamie do not communicate well until the
last act, when Jamie finally confesses his own jealousy of his brother and desire to see him
fail. Tyrone, likewise, can only criticize his sons, but his stubborn nature will not allow him
to accept criticism. All the characters have bones to pick, but they have trouble doing so in a
constructive fashion.
Most of the bones that need picking emerge in the past, which is remarkably alive for the
Tyrones. Mary in particular cannot forget the past and all the dreams she once had of being a
nun or a pianist. Tyrone too has always had high hopes for Jamie, who has been a continual
disappointment. All the conflicts and the problems from the past cannot be forgotten, and, in
fact, they seem doomed to be relived day after day. It is important to note that Long Day's
Journey into Night is not only a journey forward in time, but also a journey back into the past
lives of all the characters, who continually dip back into their old lifestyles. We are left as an
audience realizing that the family is not making progress towards betterment, but rather

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continually sliding into despair, as they remain bound to a past that they can neither forget
nor forgive.
The play is all the more tragic because it leaves little hope for the future; indeed, the future
for the Tyrones can only be seen as one long cycle of a repeated past bound in by alcohol and
morphine. This play was awarded the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published, and it has
remained one of the most admired plays of the 20th century. Perhaps most importantly, it has
achieved commercial success because nearly every family can see itself reflected in at least
some parts of the play. The Tyrone family is not a unique family, and it is easy to identify
with many of the conflicts and characters. The play has a unique appeal to both the individual
audience member and to scholars of American drama, which explains its popularity and
enduring acclaim.4

BIBLIOGRAPHY
4
https://study.com/learn/lesson/long-days-journey-into-night.html

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https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/longdays
https://www.supersummary.com/long-day-s-journey-into-night

https://www.kennedy-center.org
https://study.com/learn/lesson/long-days-journey-into-night.html

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