In Act One and Act Two there are three scenes. The first scene is set in exquisite detail, where O'Neill describes everything from the books on the wall to the rug on the floor in the living room of the Tyrone's summer home. It is morning. The setting for Act 2, Scene One is described by nothing more than the words "the same". The time is now a quarter to one in the afternoon. The setting of Act Two, Scene Two is "the same, about a half hour later".
This made me curious. I looked at the first line of the settings for Act Three and Four and the settings are both "the same". Again, the time has progressed: the Act Three is at 6:30 pm and Act Four is around midnight. The title, A Long Day's Journey Into Night makes a lot more sense now, seeing as the entire novel takes place in a day, but what is interesting is that the "journey" is a static one. Nobody really goes anywhere; the entire novel takes place in James Tyrone's living room. The last time I had a discussion about a motionless play of this kind was when we went to see Prometheus Bound. However what makes the static progression of this play so interesting is that the characters in this play are lying with every breath. It begs the question, "Where are we getting our information from?"
It's clearly not from the dialogue, and it's not from the character's actions (because in addition to not going anywhere they really don't do much, besides drink of course). To me, this explains why O'Neill's stage instructions had to be so detailed in comparison to his dialogue: our main sources of information on the characters' personalities are things like their tone of speech, their mannerisms, and most importantly of all, the way they look at one another (or the lack thereof).
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