On The Failures Of The Characters In Eugene O’Neill’s Works In Existentialism

Eugene O’Neill, a successful pioneer among American dramatist last century and winner of Nobel Prize for literature, has been much studied in and out of America. His works has ushered in a new era of realistic plays, featuring vivid, lively plots and complicated personalities. If not light-hearted, his dramas are flesh-and-blood, and give the audience a brand-new sense of life, totally different from the previous imitating works before him; hence it is justifiable to say that Eugene O’Neill is the father of American drama. From the early last century till a good number of years after he died, his plays remained hits all over America. Analytical perceptions of his works range from realism, theories of tragedy, expressionism, ecology, to feminism, post colonialism, deconstructionism, and psychic analysis etc. Some scholars take a comparative study of them with the oriental Taoism. Among the critical methods, Existentialism is one with less popularity. When talking of the existentialist expounding of his works, people would think of The Iceman Cometh. Existentialism is a philosophy which can be traced up to Socrates and Nietzsche. It reached to prime in postwar period under the advocacy of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir,Camus, and Heidegger, etc. They, though diverse in their specific area of existential study, shared the basic principles of Existentialism---free choice, action, self-transcendence, and responsibility-taking.As one of the representatives of Existentialism, Nietzsche had great influence in O’Neill (pessimistic influence, mostly). Since failures are omniscient in O’Neill’s works, it’s possible to interpret the failures of the characters in Existentialism. The essay discusses the reason behinds all those failures of the characters, both concretely and theoretically. It is found that in brief, the characters often violate some principles of Existentialism, such as freedom, commitment-taking, self-transcendence, thus they are failures.The shining point lies in that first, not just The Iceman cometh, but also other works of O’Neill-Beyond the Horizon and Long Day’s Journey are covered under the existential analysis, which stands for the prime achievements of Eugene O’Neill; second, the analysis of the failures can make sense of Eugene O’Neill’s claim that he described failures in his works. The significance of the essay is that, on one hand, it can help expand the study of his works in a new direction, and on the other, it helps dig the source of the so-called fate or destiny of the characters, which can supply the answer to the doubt which O’Neill had been sought to clear about the root of the problems, but he failed to find any answers in his whole life.Of course, limitations to this essay may inevitably appear as a result of the lack of the first-hand French materials concerning Existentialism. And the materials in English may lose some of the original meaning after translation. Some detailed definitions of Existentialism may not be professional enough as a lack of the sound foundation of philosophy. But in this essay, the author chooses the most well-known and least ambiguous conceptions in order to avoid blurs in analysis.