Though O’Neill was on the whole silent during the thirties and some of his works began to suffer from negative criticisms,he kept working hard in isolation at Tao House ,his stately mansion in Danville, California, and produced the best and greatest plays of the modern American theater late in his life.The Iceman Cometh proves to be a masterpiece in the way it is a complex, ironic, deeply moving exploring of human existence, written out of a profound insight into human nature and constructed with tremendous skill and logic Long Day’s Journey Into Night is equally impressive . The play can be read autobiographically, since some parts of the story are fairly closely based on O’Neill’s own family. However, like most great works to literature, the play reaches beyond its immediate subject, dedicated not only to the life of the American family, but also “to the life to man, to life itself.” As a product of hard-won art, Long Day’s Journey Into Night has gained its status as a world classic and simultaneously marks the climax of O’Neill’s literary career and the coming of age of American drama.
Of all the plays O’Neill’s wrote, most of them are tragedies dealing with the basic issues of human existence and predicament: life and death, illusion and disillusion, alienation and communication, dream and reality, self and society, desire and frustration , etc .His characters in the plays are described as seeing meaning and purpose in their lives in different ways, some through love , some through religion , others through revenge ,but all meet disappointment and despair. As a playwright, O’Neill himself was constantly wrestling with these issues and struggling with the perplexity about the truth of life. He was searching for and answer both psychologically and artistically, and his dramatic thought followed a tragic pattern running through all his plays , from a celebration and exaltation of “pipe dreams”, the romantic dream so to speak, to the doubt about the reality of the dream or the inevitability of the defeat .So his final dramas became “transcendental “, in the way that the dramatization of man’s effort in finding the secret of life results in a reconciliation with the tragic impossibility.
希望不要是在线翻译的答案啊,那里的翻译不好,求真正的英语高手帮忙啊
参考资料:《英美文学选读》一考通