Long Day's Journey Into Night

Edmund is the youngest son of Mary and Tyrone, and he is the protagonist of the play. Edmund is a fictional recreation of Eugene O’Neill himself, and so the play is Edmund’s, or O’Neill’s, retelling of the events of 1912. Like O’Neill, Edmund has already gone to Princeton, left to travel, and come home as a poet and reporter. Though his time in school and at sea is not fully explored, Edmund makes it clear that he has unwillingly reflected on his life and family during his travels, concluding that he is a “stranger,” with both a unique appreciation for and despair in life.

In the play, Edmund takes the role of an outside observer. He has been away from the family for some years, and so his perspective on the family’s issues is more detached. While Jamie, Tyrone, and Mary seem to live near or with each other year-round, as Tyrone and Jamie are both in the acting circuit, Edmund has received some education and worldly experience. Though he shares a lot of ideas with Jamie, his knowledge of nihilism and decadence are more refined, backed by an understanding of writers like Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Dowson.