Who Is to Blame in "Long Day's Journey Into Night"?
When things are not going according to plan there are often blames and guilty consciences for the problems going on. Take family for instance, if a family has uneducated and bad-mannered kids, there are the parents to blame. And if the parents lose their minds because of the bad children that they spawned to earth, the kids are to blame. But who takes the most responsible for the suffering in the family? In the book Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’neill, a disastrous family is portrayed. Everyone in that family seems to be obsessed with either feeling guilty about what they’ve done in the past to make their family like this now, or blaming someone else for the problems they are now facing. Out of all characters, James Tyrone, the father and leader of the family, is most responsible for the suffering of the family because he is the person that started and led the family down a road of destruction through his bad habits of drinking and stingy spending habits. Just like Mary is dependent of morphine, James is dependent of alcohol; they both seek to hide from their problems through drug abuse, and this has caused miscommunication within the family. Mary justifies her use of morphine through the whiskey consumption of James. They would often blame each other for their drug abuse. The true problem here is James is the one who caused Mary to be addicted to morphine; therefore, as the origin of the trouble, he should have helped her quit and recover, instead of trying to drink his way out of problems. But instead, he spends a lot of free time in saloons with hard-drink companions. If James Tyrone didn’t have such bad drinking habits, Mary wouldn’t have a reason to be strongly addicted to morphine, since their abuses of drug justifies each others’. James’ intense drinking habits have also affected his children, causing both Edmund and Jamie to be heavy drinkers that always appear drunk or drinking in every scene. Although their family love binds them together