Eugene O'Nill Biography // Life And Works of Eugene O Nill // American Playwright

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Eugene O’NillQue- Evaluate O’Nill as a modern play wright.ORWrite a note on the dramatic technique employed by O’Nill.ORWrite a note on Eugene O’Nill Expressionism.


Eugene O‘Nill is one of the greatest American dramatists. He is creator of serious American drama. He was only playwright of America to win Nobel prize in literature. He won Pulitzer prize four times in his life. Before him the American dramatists wrote farce, comedy and melodrama. The American drama was sickly, sufferings from the disease of romance and melodrama. No greatly moving and powerful play was written. O’Nill brought about a revolution in American drama by writing purely an objective kind of drama showing the working of man’s mind and conscience. He was one of first dramatists who created the serious American drama. His famous plays are: The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones, Desire under the Elms etc..

The themes of O’Nill”s plays are man’s frustration, failure, misery, lack of love and understanding. O’Nill’ began his dramatic career as a realist. The emperor Jones was the first play in which O’Nill used Expressionistic technique to express the psychological terrors and obsession of Brutus Jones.

In this way he began experiments in expressionistic technique. Expressionism is a dramatic technique which enables a dramatist to depict ‘inner reality’. The expressionist wants to portray and present through other symbols inner reality. The expressionistic playwright presents the condition and working of the mind of his characters and wants to show their anger sadness, sorrow etc. Expressionism is a revolt and protest again society. The inner reality is communicated through various devices such as soliloquies, broken dialogues, stage effects such a lighting, costumers, etc.
As pure ‘theatre’, The Emperor Jones is one of the best of all O’Nill’s plays, though most of it is only a dramatic monologue. The Emperor Jones play is not divided into acts but into scenes. There is a blending of Realism and expressionism in the play. O’Nill used elaborately the expressionistic technique in The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones, and Welded. He gave up this technique after writing Welded(1924). However, he blended expressionism with realism.
He writes tragedies of modern life which do not follow the traditional Aristotelian form. O’Nill’s tragic hero is not an Aristotelian hero. Apart from that Symbolism is an important aspect of O’Nill’s technique of communication and expression. Symbolism may be defined “as the use of any part or parts of a play character, incident, setting and situation.”