LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13 : 3 March 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Tragic Vision in the Works of Eugene O’Neill

M. Jayachandran, M.A., M.Phil.
Dr. R. Mahendran, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.

Introduction

Eugene O’Neill’s position in the history of American drama is well established. He is a sincere and conscientious writer who gains popularity and fame as a serious playwright by virtue of his remarkable social consciousness. He has paved the way for an understanding of the predicament by presenting the basic concepts of life through a picture of the American society. The more O'Neill's characters yearn for some higher ideal, for spiritual fulfillment or intellectual or moral freedom, the more mired they become in doomed relationships, addiction, and squalor. O'Neill was a finer thinker than has often been acknowledged, and not quite as solipsistic as his plays can seem in isolation. He wrote not only out of his own suffering and damage, but also rooting his sense of America's modern failures in a framework of classical tragedy.

O’Neill’s Tragic Vision

O’Neill is a modern tragic artist who has a fine sense of dramatic values and a penetrating insight into emotion. His imagination has a fiery heat which uplifts and ennobles everything it touches, even the sordid and the mean. Masood Ali Khan maintains that, “O’Neill’s sense of the dramatic in life and its realization in the theatre is ever present, and certainly nothing can cancel out his innate ability to tell a story.” (p. 124). His plays portray man in relation to his social environment, and in one play after another he criticized the whole structure of contemporary American society. That is why his plays are more than moment’s entertainment. It is not man as an individual alone that concerns O’Neill; it is man in a social order, tortured, starved, disillusioned, thwarted and driven to disaster by the forces of a system which cares nothing for the general welfare of society. Man moves across the stage of O’Neill’s plays not as a free and undetached individual, not merely as an individual in relation to a few characters who are associated with him in the immediate drama which makes the play, but he treats man against a rich background of social forces. It is the social implication that makes his plays to have a life in the minds of the audience after they have left the theatre and scattered the quiet of individual thought.

O’Neill’s plays are mostly tragedies, but they are tragedies which strike at the very roots of the sickness of today. They attempt to explain human sufferings and the way to justify it. In a letter to George Jean Nathan O’ Neill wrote,

The playwright must dig at the roots of sickness of today as he feels it the death of the old God and the failure of science and materialism to give any satisfying new one for the surviving primitive religious instinct to find a meaning for life in … (xvii).

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

M. Jayachandran, M.A., M.Phil.
jai3chandran@gmail.com

Dr. R. Mahendran, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
drarmahendran@gmail.com

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