Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Long Day's Journey into Night" in Simple English language version.
The theme is one of high tragedy : the unsuccessful struggle to escape the consequences of past actions. In Elizabethan drama, the actions are those of the protagonists, if only in the sense that their own characters, formed by the past, are responsible for the tragedy. Here the father and the elder brother are thus entrapped, like Macbeth or Othello or, better, the heroine of Middleton's The Changeling. But the mother is a different case. The reviewer's cliché about "the inevitability of Greek tragedy" is for once justified. The mother's drug addiction is not the result of her own actions but of her husband's miserliness in calling in a cheap doctor who gave her morphine to ease the pains of a difficult childbirth. The husband is thus punished for his own character, as in Elizabethan tragedy.
