Reconstruction Of The Past In Long Day's Journey Into Night And The Iceman Cometh

Western drama,restricted by stage performance,cannot represent on stage completely and faithfully the events that happened before the current time.Due to this limit,dialogues and monologues are usually the main ways to recall the previous events.Such recollections are also processes for the characters to reprocess their memories of the past.Long Day's Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh,two of Eugene O'Neill's late plays,observe “the three unities” strictly.The stage time in both plays is one day,while happenings in each are so rich that they go well beyond the apparent time limit.In order to fit all these actions within one day,O'Neill uses lots of recollections in the form of conversation to bring back the incidents that happened before.Since reconstruction of past is a recurrent motif of the two plays,this thesis endeavors to analyze how the major characters in each play reconstruct their pasts from the narratological perspective and further attempts to reveal the psychological motivations behind the reconstructions.This thesis is divided into three chapters.Chapter I is particularly concerned with how Mary in Long Day's Journey into Night and Hope in The Iceman Cometh look at the previous versions of themselves with a purpose to indulge themselves in a sense of self-enhancement.They often use a limited retrospective point of view – first person internal focalization to do narration.They place themselves at the center of the narration by exaggerating their pleasant experiences,concealing unpleasant ones and derogating others,so as to achieve self-enhancement.Chapter II investigates how James Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night and Parritt and Hickey in The Iceman Cometh reshape their pasts to achieve self-justification and to gain themselves a mental redemption.They stand outside the story as a mere observer and use a first person external focalization to do narration.They focus on the reorganization of the previous events.By reappearing shared or similar experiences,they appeal for the listeners' empathy so as to achieve whitewashing.In his part,O'Neill inserts many “off stage” characters so as to highlight the inescapability of the past.Chapter III attempts to shed light on how Larry and Edmund try to deconstruct their illusions and reconstruct a philosophical inner world in order to achieve self-transcendence.They use an “editorial omniscience” mode of narration to do reconstruction by mainly focusing on the subjective feelings rather than the past events.Characters like them to some extent resemble O'Neill himself.O'Neill often takes advantage of these characters to express his own opinion on life.This thesis concludes that the main psychological motivation of the characters' reconstructions are to achieve self-deception and to escape the reality.In creating characters reshaping their past in different ways,O'Neill has displayed rich repertoire in building characters and reinforced the artistic effect of the plays.The past is not the real past but the past in present's view.By revealing the deceptive nature of reconstruction,Eugene O'Neill seems to call on the public to step out of the illusory past and to face the reality.