Depiction of The Tyrone Family in Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O'neill

In the Tyrone family, they have been shown to argue with each other all day and night. We have seen how Edmund reacts to his father, James, when they discuss moving him into a sanatorium. James wants to bring his son to a local sanatorium, instead of one of the more expensive ones. We have also seen how James dismisses his oldest son, Jamie, as being a failure and an overall terrible influence/role model on Edmund. Their fights are also more common, and normally take an aggressive, outspoken tone. Even Mary has instances when she exclaims how angry she was about the house. However, despite all of these problems, there’s something always missing: the past. Mary was a morphine addict after having Edmund, and James being too cheap to pay for a better doctor. Though she has been to rehab, her addiction had overwhelmed her.

The story of Long Day’s Journey into Night is also just an average day for the Tyrone family. Through Mary’s arguments, the audience understands that she wishes that she was still in the past, and it is also shown to be her escape from reality when she’s using morphine. When Mary is told to “forget the past”, she responds by asking how could she forget the past when the, “past is the present… It’s the future, too. ” Her representation of how the past is present, and future suggests that all of her choices from then has lead up to now, and will be ever present in her life. Each family member is subsequently stuck in the past, and the “What-if” of life. Besides Edmund, they have all shown signs that they will only degrees further into the past.

Mary was in a covenant, and had faith in the Virgin Mary. Once she married James though, her faith dwindled. Her resolution to this problem was to live in the past. This shows how disconnected she feels from her family, especially her husband. Jamie fancied poetry. He had been shown to recite rather long passages from memory; Jamie is also shown as a lazy, talentless slacker. He drinks all day, and goes into town to visit women. Every day now, he does nothing. “Forget everything and face nothing”, is what he tells his mother after she says they cannot forget. During a conversation with Edmund, he apologized for being a bad influence, and for even trying to poison his younger brother with his own toxicity. Jamie’s relationship with his family is aggressive, and detached. His philosophy is forgetting the entire past, and consequentially, he will face nothing. James also shares his regrets with his son, Jamie. He had sold out, instead of moving out from a good paying acting job, and onto more challenging roles, he had to stick to the current one. Like his sons, he is addicted to alcohol. His attempts to escape are from the current problems in the story: Mary’s addiction to morphine, Jamie despises him, and Edmund is potentially going to die, and he’s partly to blame for every part of it. He drinks to escape the reality of the situation, and like the others, try to forget into the past. With youngest son, they discuss the cost of bringing him to a nice sanatorium; though they fight until Edmund throws a coughing fit, they finally come to an understanding. Edmund did not know about his mother’s addiction until much later in his life; During one fight, Mary had raged about how she hadn't wanted him to begin with. This is announced again by James, and both times Jamie was reassured that the speaker was lying. Edmund is shown to be an alcoholic to cope with his mother relapsing. With this, and his tuberculosis, Mary has stressed over him numerous times throughout the play, though Edmund tries to calm her down. It makes the two feel more connected than anyone else in the story, despite their argument. Jamie was a huge influence on Edmund’s past, and one of the other reasons he is an alcoholic now.

Overall, the Tyrone family is shown to be broken and disconnected from each other, as well as almost each character feeling lost with themselves in some form of the past. This creates tension in the relationship between each character. The past is a prevalent theme in the play, as it creates an understanding on why a character acts towards another, or why they may do the things they do.