Long Days Journey: The Significance of Fog (8)
A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, by Eugene O’Neill, is a deeply autobiographical play. His life was rampant with confusion and addictions in his family. Each character in this play has a profound resemblance, and draws parallels and connections with a member of his own family. The long journey that the title of the play refers to is a journey into his past. Fog is a recurring metaphor in the play; it is a physical presence even before it becomes a crucial symbol of the family’s impenetrable confusion. It is referred to in the text as well as stage directions in this play. It sets the mood for the play in all its somber hues.
He uses the fog outside the house as an atmospheric element that has an ominous presence throughout this play. His parents and the surroundings that he grew up in were tainted by broken dreams, lies, disease, past issues, alcoholism and drug addiction. There was this web of darkness and fogginess that encased his life and past that is portrayed in this play as well as others by O’Neill. The symbolic implications of fog in the play are descriptive of the struggle in the minds of this deeply conflicted family. The significance of fog in O’Neill’s writing can be examined in two forms. The first is what type of emblematic quality does the fog provide in this play, and the second is what are other plays in which O’Neill has used fog in a similar way.
This play takes place through an entire day where the climate mirrors the mood of the family. “ The play begins at 8:30 in the morning with a trace of fog in the air, and concludes sometime after midnight, with the house foghorn.” (Brustein 1020). The intensity of the fog continuously increases throughout the day, directly correlating to the murkiness in the household. The family’s mood significantly intensifies with the intensity of the fog. There are copious
connections between the life of the fog and that of the Tyrone family. All throughout the play there is a conflict between past vs. present, truth vs. lies, and addiction vs. sobriety. This family lives amidst a haze of denial and as the fog gets thicker, they continue to get further lost.
The fog has a polarity that directly relates to Mary, “… the mood changing from sunny cheer over Mary’s apparent recovery to gloomy despair over her new descent into hell ” (Brustein 1020). The fog is fi...
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...n clarities. The fog is created out of pain in order to dilute clarity. The individuals in this play needed to escape themselves but didn’t succeed. O’Neill expresses the same fear of truth and uses the imagery of fog in The Iceman Cometh. The Iceman Cometh is written in the same time period as Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and is a parallel in the struggle of the past vs. present. The use of the fog imagery is not as direct in this play, but there are subtle mentions of fog in the play, such as “ the gray subdued light of early morning in a narrow street” (O’Neill 660). This grayness is almost identical to the morning that the Tyrone family experiences after being awakened by the foghorns. Both stories spell the gloom and dreariness of these characters and their lives. The imagery of fog wasn’t as prominent in the rest of his plays.
O’Neill had a great amount of turmoil in his life and the Long Day’s Journey Into Night story reflected perfectly the fogginess and daze he lived through. His dark life experiences have given him a rich, emotionally charged place, from which to write. The fog serves as a tool to paint the dreary picture and symbolize this darkness through his plays.
1. Chapter 3, page 5, #3: “A little fog hung over the river so that as I neared it I felt myself becoming isolated from everything except the river and the few trees beside it. The wind was blowing more steadily here, and I was beginning to feel cold.”
Many would say that Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were both awful men and even worse leaders in their countries. But, if you really sat down to think about how they ran their form of government, they were actually two of the most vainglorious leaders in the world at that time. Hitler was able to go from being a soldier in World War I to being the supreme leader of Germany. Benito was able to go from being a brief schoolteacher, to being a 10-year journalist.
scene ii, ll.46-50). This quote from the play also shows the importance of night and
Every time the family comes to a confrontation someone retreats to the past and reflects on life as it was back then, not dealing with life as it is for them today. Tom, assuming the macho role of the man of the house, babies and shelters Laura from the outside world. His mother reminds him that he is to feel a responsibility for his sister. He carries this burden throughout the play. His mother knows if it were not for his sisters needs he would have been long gone. Laura must pickup on some of this, she is so sensitive she must sense Toms feeling of being trapped. Tom dreams of going away to learn of the world, Laura is aware of this and she is frightened of what may become of them if he were to leave.
The American Renaissance introduced an individualistic approach to viewing society and human nature that focused on equality and the inherent goodness of all mankind. The period ushered in the beginning of widespread movements toward race and gender equality. Out of Sentimental Romanticism came several very successful female writers who used emotional appeals to relate the plights of women to readers. The Transcendentalists who held a philosophical understanding of equality based on human nature rather than characteristics of individuals, asserted that all people are equal by nature, yet didn’t particularly concern themselves with inequality of women. In thought, the Dark Romantics shared the same belief in equality as the other groups of Romantics.
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Firstly, the narrator gives little detail throughout the whole story. The greatest amount of detail is given in the first paragraph where the narrator describes the weather. This description sets the tone and mood of the events that follow. Giving the impression that a cold, wet, miserable evening was in
The Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule has undergone a harsh and controversial development. This article not only critically analyzes the numerous alternatives and slight modifications to the exclusionary rule but the advanced by courts and commentators as well, (Schroeder, 1361). The article also puts emphasis on the alternative route of police policy making and a means to control official misconduct and violations of citizens rights. The exclusionary rule is one of the most significant defense stance of the fourth amendment. ITs establishment has created a wide spread of protection against violations of citizens rights.
...he Chancellor and Chancery both being the cause and the centre of the fog, paralleling the weather with the situation. Fog is not a good thing in the court of Chancery and the narrator describes the Chancery as having a dark and unclear vision. They are not good at their jobs and the narrator calls the old Chancellor as being ?leaden-headed? or ?stupid? to emphasizing his views on that particular character.
However, wolf left the enforcement of Fourth Amendment right to the discretion of the individual states and did not specifically require application of the exclusionary rule. That mandate did not come until 1961, in the landmark decision of Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 655, in which the court said: since the Fourth Amendment’s right of privacy has been dec...
In Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the narrator, Chief Bromden, sees the world through a mechanical lens. He recognizes that what he sees may not be truthful, but does not provide us with another viewpoint. One of the key elements of his perspective is the fog. At first, it seems the fog is a safe haven, somewhere to hide, but as the book carries on, we learn the fog might mean something else entirely. The arrival of the protagonist, Randle McMurphy, mysteriously causes the fog to fade. Thus, we wonder: Is the fog real and why does it disappear?
Birth and reproductive rights have proved to be a much more complicated issue when looking through a feminist, intersectional lense, than how it is perceived by the American public. Bettina gave an enlightening lecture on reproductive and birth rights, explaining all the components involved in birth rights issues; and the intersections of these issues with other issues in feminism. Zakiya Luna Further illustrates this in her essay, “From Rights to Justice: Women of Color Changing the Face of US Reproductive Rights Organizing”. She emphasizes the need to treat women 's rights as human rights. The US needs to focus on tackling and acknowledging these many human rights issues that it is facing.
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