Long Day’s Journey into Night: Act Four Summary & Analysis

The Tyrones can’t help but argue with one another, even when they don’t want to. Although Mary is normally the one instigating disputes, in this moment James and Edmund are at odds with one another on their own terms, a sign that their familial problems don’t all revolve around Mary. However, James finds it difficult to fight with his son because doing so makes him feel guilty. In turn, O’Neill shows the audience that the threat of Edmund’s illness is forever lurking in the family members’ collective consciousness.

Once again, O’Neill showcases the ways in which the Tyrone family goes back and forth between argument and forgiveness. In this scene, James and Edmund weave their way in and out of disputes, and James displays his loving concern for Edmund’s wellbeing by telling him not to drink, despite the fact that this is a rather hypocritical thing for him—a hard-drinking man—to say.

Unlike his mother, Edmund welcomes loneliness and isolation. Whereas Mary can’t stand to be alone, he relishes the idea that he’s by himself “in another world” where he can’t even see the people or places surrounding him. “Halfway down the path you can’t see this house,” he tells his father, a sentiment that indicates just how badly he wishes he could remove himself from the tumultuous emotional landscape of the Tyrone family. Unfortunately, he can’t bring himself to leave behind his family in earnest because he loves them.

When Edmund says, “Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?” he admits his desire to blot out the world by drinking. What he wants, it seems, is to alter the way he sees the world, searching for a way to make his otherwise bleak reality at least somewhat manageable. And though this is indeed a “morbid” thought, his father can’t help but agree, since he too uses alcohol to help him accept the difficulties of life. However, James correctly articulates the fact that this kind of coping doesn’t actually lead to acceptance, but rather resignation.

Although James and Edmund love Mary and are distraught that she has relapsed once again, they don’t want to see her. In fact, it is exactly because they’re so unhappy about her condition that they want to avoid having to look at her, as if pretending she’s not there will somehow help them forget their troubles. What’s more, they suggest that she isn’t truly there anyway, upholding that she’s “nothing but a ghost haunting the past” after having used morphine all day. In turn, they put their finger on the fact that Mary romanticizes the past as a way of ignoring her current reality.

In this moment, O’Neill calls attention to a difficult question: why do addicts take drugs? Does Mary take morphine because she already feels like there is “a bank of fog” around her, or does she take it specifically to achieve that “effect”? Of course, O’Neill provides no answer to this question, thereby inviting the audience to experience the frustrated confusion that a drug addict’s loved ones go through when trying to understand addiction.

Once more, members of the Tyrone family blame one another. As James and Edmund try to force guilt onto one another, the audience begins to feel just how fatiguing this dynamic truly is. Indeed, it’s exhausting to watch these family members accuse each other of malice when, in reality, no one is to blame for Mary’s addiction. In turn, O’Neill underlines the ways in which addiction puts a strain on otherwise loving relationships.

When James talks about “judging things by what [Mary] says when she’s not in her right mind,” he implies that Edmund is to blame for his mother’s addiction, since Mary only started taking morphine after she gave birth to him (since the process of labor was so painful). And although he stops before fully voicing this thought, Edmund understands what he means and immediately feels dejected and sad—an indication that he does in fact feel partially responsible for his mother’s addiction. At the same time, though, he immediately tries to distract himself from this feeling by once more attacking James. As such, the toxic cycle of denial, blame, and guilt circles on and on.

Edmund can’t help but find humor in the fact that his father is trying to convince him to go to the cheapest available sanitorium. The fact that he agrees to go, though, is a testament to his love for his father, as he ultimately decides to put James first by agreeing to undergo the least expensive medical treatment. Of course, this might be a simple act of kindness, but it also suggests that Edmund has given up hope and resigned himself to the possibility that he might die. As such, he doesn’t care which sanitorium he attends.

Although James says that it’s “a late day for regrets,” it’s clear that this is exactly what he’s doing: regretting the mistakes he made in the past. Like Mary, he can’t help but think wistfully about the many choices he could have made instead of the ones he actually did make. In turn, his disappointment is perhaps why he spends his time drinking—he wants to be able to tell himself that his regrets don’t “matter,” but this is only something he can convince himself of when he’s drunk.

Despite the fact that James says he’d be willing to “have no home but the poorhouse” if only he could “look back now” on a respectable artistic career, the audience senses that this isn’t actually the case. After all, he’s currently in the process of turning off lights in order to save money, thereby demonstrating his obsession with riches. Nonetheless, his drunkenness blinds him to the irony of this moment, enabling him to deny the fact that he’s kidding himself.

Perhaps the most important word of Edmund’s monologue about his time at sea is the word “belonged.” Indeed, when he says that he felt a sense of belonging as he crashed through the waves and looked up at the night sky, he suggests that he finally was able to shake his feeling of loneliness and isolation. However, the audience should note that he experienced this while staring into the sky in the middle of the ocean—an incredibly isolated moment in and of itself. As such, it seems Edmund felt that he “belonged” simply because he embraced the idea of loneliness. Coming to terms with the beauty of belonging to “something greater than [his] own life,” he found himself at ease, having finally transcended his loneliness by merely embracing it. Unlike his mother, then, he manages to find happiness in the idea of being alone. Mary, on the other hand, wants to banish her feeling of loneliness by living in a proper home, but it’s clear this would do nothing to ease her sense of isolation. What she needs to do, O’Neill implies, is come to terms with loneliness as an unassailable part of life. This, it seems, is what Edmund was able to do at sea. 

Although Edmund has achieved a sense of “belonging,” he recognizes that he won’t always feel this way. Indeed, he has become accustomed to the isolating sensation of “fog” rolling in around him, and he doesn’t truly know how to fight this feeling. As such, he simply lives with his loneliness. Having had a transcendent experience—in which he accessed the “secret” of life—he is no closer to actually understanding or controlling his current circumstances. This, he implies, is simply the way life works. 

Unlike Mary, Edmund accepts that he will “never feel at home.” Indeed, he believes that he will always live the life of a “stranger” who doesn’t “belong.” By contrast, Mary tries hard to deny the fact that loneliness and isolation are simply part of life, but this denial only makes it harder for her to cope with her current circumstances. Although Edmund is certainly not a model of happiness, O’Neill suggests, he at least doesn’t shy away from harsh realities.

Yet again, O’Neill shows the audience how quickly the members of the Tyrone family can get into an argument and then forget about the dispute altogether. In this instance, Edmund even punches Jamie, but the event still passes without much drama (all things considered). In turn, O’Neill spotlights yet another example of how guilt and rage influence the Tyrone family’s relational dynamics.

In this moment, Jamie delivers a strange combination of sincerity and blame. On the one hand, he seems genuinely concerned about protecting Edmund from himself. On the other hand, though, he also delivers a cruel remark, ultimately blaming Edmund for Mary’s addiction to morphine. In this way, his confession is fraught with tension—so much so that the audience undoubtedly will wonder if he’s being sincere or simply trying to make Edmund feel guilty and sorry for him. 

The higher Mary gets, the more removed she seems from her present reality. What’s more, she appears to have journeyed even further into the past, so that now her face “appears” “youthful.” In this way, O’Neill presents her as a woman who’s deliberately evading the present. Morphine, the audience understands, is the only way she thinks she can access her past life, which she has romanticized in light of her dismal current circumstances. And yet, it’s obvious that she can’t recapture her youthfulness, as made evident by the fact that she’s dragging her wedding dress on the floor, ultimately sullying it. In this way, O’Neill suggests that Mary’s idealization of the past only desiccates the memory of that time period, which she’ll never be able to relive.

When Jamie starts to cry, the audience understands that his callous jokes and brazen attitude are only feeble attempts to hide his grief. By making cruel quips about his mother’s addiction, he tries to deny just how troubled he is about the entire situation. When Edmund slaps him, though, he finds himself incapable of keeping up this charade, which is why he suddenly breaks down.

Although Mary has plunged herself into the past, her family members have not. This is why James is so troubled to see her dragging her wedding dress on the floor—he understands that she’s sullying the past by trying to relive it. For him, it’s painful to watch his beloved wife ruin herself while fantasizing about her previous life. Worse, she’s not even truly thinking about her wedding, but about the period of her life before she met James. Indeed, she is mainly pretending to be a girl in the convent; the wedding dress is just something she happens to have in her hands. As such, James is forced to watch her drag the dress around as an afterthought.

The “it” to which Mary refers is left intentionally vague. When she says, “I remember when I had it I was never lonely nor afraid,” the audience understands why she doesn’t even know what she’s looking for. After all, there’s nothing in life that can completely banish loneliness. Unfortunately, though, Mary believes there must be some way to alleviate her unhappiness, and so she has spent her life searching for this elusive “it,” ultimately turning to morphine because it’s the only thing that numbs her to the world. 

Seeing that his mother is using morphine in order to run from the things that upset her, Edmund decides to force the truth upon her. To do this, he tells her pointblank that he has consumption. And although it seems for a moment as if she understands what he has said, she quickly forces herself to keep up her ruse of living in the past. This, of course, is yet another attempt to turn away from reality.

This is an important moment in Long Day’s Journey into Night. Throughout the play, the Tyrone men have tried many times to deal with the hardship of Mary’s addiction. Mostly, though, they’ve turned to alcohol as a source of relief, ultimately practicing the same kind of escapist behavior as Mary herself. Now, though, O’Neill shows the audience once and for all that the Tyrones won’t find solace in drinking. Indeed, when Mary begins speaking and the three men put down their glasses—forgetting about their toast—O’Neill suggests that their sadness is so all-consuming that it eclipses their desire to drink. Nothing they do, O’Neill intimates, will ever distract them from the sorrow they feel about Mary.

At this point, it’s clear that the Tyrones have fully lost Mary to the past. High out of her mind and unwilling to acknowledge the present, she has plunged into her past life. In turn, the title of the play once again brings itself to bear on the characters; Mary has, it seems, been on a “long” “journey” throughout the entire day, dosing herself with morphine until now, finally, she has lost herself to the “night,” when she can finally leave the present altogether and lose herself to an uninterrupted fantasy of the past.

The end of Long Day’s Journey into Night is appropriately anti-climactic. After all, this is not a play with a robust or surprising plot. Rather, the entire production concerns itself with the ways in which the Tyrone family copes with sadness and addiction. For Mary, this means taking drugs and reminiscing about the past as a way of ignoring the present. As such, the play ends with her staring out into “a sad dream” of the past, rehashing the moment her life changed and set her on a path to unhappiness. Meanwhile, her family members sit idly by, feeling utterly helpless. Estranged from Mary because she is nothing but a “ghost haunting the past,” they have no choice but to resign themselves to the hopeless reality of her addiction.