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Essay / Portrayal of the Tyrone family in Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'neill
In the Tyrone family, they were shown to argue all day and night. We've seen how Edmund reacts to his father, James, when they discuss his transfer to a sanitarium. James wants to take his son to a local sanitarium, rather than one of the more expensive ones. We also saw how James rejects his eldest son, Jamie, as a failure and an overall terrible influence/role model on Edmund. Their fights are also more frequent and normally take an aggressive and frank tone. Even Mary has moments where she exclaims how angry she was at the house. However, despite all these problems, something is still missing: the past. Mary was addicted to morphine after having Edmund, and James was too cheap to pay for a better doctor. Although she went to rehab, her addiction overwhelmed her. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get Original Essay The story of Long Day's Journey into Night is also just an ordinary day for the Tyrone family. Through Mary's arguments, the audience understands that she wishes she was still in the past, and it also turns out that she escapes reality when she consumes morphine. When Mary is told to “forget the past,” she responds by wondering how could she forget the past when “the past is the present…It is also the future.” “His depiction of how the past is present and future suggests that all of his choices then have led up to now and will always be present in his life. Each member of the family is then stuck in the past and the “what ifs” of life. Besides Edmond, they all showed signs that they would only move forward in the past. Mary was in a covenant and had faith in the Virgin Mary. Once she married James, her faith diminished. His solution to this problem was to live in the past. This shows how disconnected she feels from her family, especially her husband. Jamie loved poetry. He had been shown to recite fairly long passages from memory; Jamie is also presented as a lazy, talentless slacker. He drinks all day and goes into town to visit the women. Every day now, he does nothing. “Forget everything and face nothing,” is what he tells his mother after she tells him they can’t forget. During a conversation with Edmund, he apologized for being a bad influence and even trying to poison his younger brother with his own toxicity. Jamie's relationship with his family is aggressive and detached. His philosophy is to forget everything about the past and therefore he will not face anything. James also shares his regrets with his son, Jamie. He had sold out, instead of leaving a well-paying acting job to pursue more challenging roles, he had to stick with his current one. Like his sons, he is an alcoholic. His escape attempts stem from the story's current problems: Mary's addiction to morphine, Jamie despises him, and Edmund is potentially going to die, and he is partly to blame for all of this. He drinks to escape the reality of the situation and, like the others, tries to forget the past. With their youngest son, they discuss the cost of transporting him to a nice sanatorium; although they fight until Edmund has a coughing fit, they eventually reach an agreement. Edmund did not learn of his mother's addiction until much later in his life; During a fight, Mary was furious about how she didn't want him in the first place. This is announced again by James, and each time Jamie has been reassured that.