"A Little In Love With Death"

Death is a perennial topic of literature whose richness and diversity fascinate the authors to expound from many standpoints. For the father of American drama, Eugene O’Neill, who is credited with raising American dramatic theatre from its narrow origins to an art form respected all over the world, death is a life-long obsession both personally and as a literary theme. In O’Neill himself, the contemplation of death is strikingly strong and once he attempted suicide to end his problems of life. Death is also a pervasive aspect of nearly all O’Neill’s tragedies which mostly end with the death and destruction of the characters.The purpose of this thesis is to examine the death complex in selected plays of Eugene O’Neill on both a physical and a spiritual level, explore his view of death reflected in his deep death complex and show how the death complex is linked with his tragic vision.The thesis is divided into five parts. An introductory part gives a brief overview of O’Neill, his plays and his significance to the American drama. Besides, a literature review of the criticism on O’Neill is also included.In the seond part, O’Neill’s treatments of death complex are elaborated at length on two levels---the physical death and the spiritual death through text analysis. As far as the physical death is concerned, as the quest for belonging, the conquest of desire and the birth of a new life, death is endowed with sublimation. In terms of the spiritual death, it takes the form of death-in-life. The characters, especailly the major ones, may cherish a morbid longing for death but they still survive and suffer.As for the third part, the roots of O’Neill’s death complex is explored from three aspects. Firstly, O’Neill lived at the turn of the 20th century, an era of material prosperity and spiritual impoverishment. People in the 20th century also experienced an unprecedented spiritual crisis, with Nietzsche’s bold cry that God is dead. The two world wars and the Great Depression exposed too many killings, injuries and deaths to people. Such a social backgrond provides a historical context for O’Neill’s death complex. Secondly, O’Neill is greatly influenced by the two great traditions of western tragegy, namely the Greek tragedy and the Shakespearean tragedy in which death plays an essential part in expressing the tragic conflicts and elevating the tragic heroes. Thirdly, O’Neill’s love of death is highly related to his family tragedy and personal experiences, which can be generalized as the internal factor of his death complex.The fourth part dwells on O’Neill’s view of death embodied in his death complex. O’Neill voices his positive attitude towards death in his early plays and his protagonists greet death willingly as an end of sufferings and a beginning of a new life. Whereas in his middle plays, especailly the late ones, the major characters deny death and cling tenaciously to life although they harbor death wishes. Moreover, the characteristics of O’Neill’s view of death can be discovered. With the change of his dramaturgy, death is also given different treatments from life-in-death to death-in-life. Besides, O’Neill’s view of death has much to do with his tragic vision.The conclusion summarizes the importance of death in O’Neill’s plays. It also points out that the pervasion of death in O’Neill’s plays can not justify him as a pessimist. Death is not the negation of life, but on the contrary, it is a medium for O’Neill to urge us to re-examine life and get a recognition of the eternal question of meaning.