Long Day’s Journey into Night (Plot Summary)

Plot Summary

Long Day’s Journey into Night is set in the living room of the Tyrones’ shoreline summer home in New London, Connecticut, in August of 1912. The play begins in the morning and ends late at night on the same day.

The work is divided into four acts. It largely consists of painful disclosures and acrimonious exchanges among the four family members, as major crises mount and finally engulf the family in despair. Of central concern are Mary’s relapse into morphine addiction, Jamie’s continued descent into irreversible dissipation, and Edmund’s grim discovery that he has tuberculosis and must enter a sanatorium.

Act One

The play, which opens just after breakfast, begins on a hopeful note, evident in the affectionate exchange between James and Mary Tyrone, but it is clear that Mary is being carefully watched by her family. Neither her morphine addiction nor Edmund’s obvious ill health are honestly discussed. Instead, the characters fence around the truth with evasive banter, though, at times, resentment and disappointment surface. Tyrone upbraids Jamie, his eldest son, for encouraging Edmund, the younger son, to follow in Jamie’s dissolute footsteps. Jamie, ever critical of “the Old Man,” in turn derides Tyrone as a miser, ultimately to blame for Mary’s addiction and Edmund’s ill health because of his penny-pinching reluctance to pay for competent doctors. To die father and sons, it becomes obvious that Mary is growing unstable, but she blames her edginess on a lack of sleep caused by Tyrone’s snoring and the foghorn that sounded throughout the previous night. After the men leave to take up outside chores, Mary sinks into an armchair, clearly in a state of nervous agitation that threatens the last vestiges of her self-control.

Act Two, Scene One

The scene opens just before lunch. Edmund and Jamie sneak some of their father’s whiskey and men resort to Jamie’s usual trick of watering the remaining whiskey to disguise their actions. Their discussion shifts from Edmund’s health to their fears about their mother, and Jamie grows distraught because Edmund has let Mary stay upstairs by herself. When she enters, it is evident to both of mem that she has succumbed to the drug, smashing their hopes that she had finally shaken herself free of it. Jamie’s sneering remarks about his father anger Mary, who excuses her husband’s stinginess as the result of his hard life. She also fends off Jamie’s insinuation that she has lapsed into her addiction again. Tyrone enters, and he soon realizes what has happened. After his sons exit for lunch, he remains behind with Mary, angry and defeated by her condition.

Act Two, Scene Two

The family returns to the living room after lunch. A telephone call from Dr. Hardy confirms the diagnosis of Edmund’s sickness as tuberculosis. Edmund must keep an afternoon appointment with Hardy. Although the full truth remains hidden from Mary, her verbal attack on Hardy indicates that she knows that Edmund suffers from more than “a summer cold.” She leaves to go upstairs, and it is clear to the rest that she is going to use more morphine. The father-son recriminations begin again, with Tyrone accusing both Jamie and Edmund of abandoning their Catholic faith to embrace damning alternatives: in Jamie’s case, degeneracy, and in Edmund’s, a gloomy and self-destructive philosophy. Edmund leaves and Jamie warns his father not to put Edmund in a second-rate sanatorium, prone as he is to look for the cheapest way out. Mary returns and, left alone with Tyrone, complains about her loneliness and Tyrone’s tightfisted failure to provide a real home. She bitterly blames Tyrone’s lifestyle for past disasters, including her difficult birthing of Edmund and postpartum pain, then begins to drift into the solace of her romanticized past, when she was in a convent school planning to become a nun or a concert pianist. Edmund returns and pleads with her to stop taking the morphine, but it is clearly to no avail. She can only try to make him stop blaming himself for her renewed addiction.

Act Three

It is early evening, and Mary has sunk further into her drug-induced detachment from reality, which, like the gathering fog outside, “hides you from the world.” She is alone with Cathleen, the servant who had accompanied her on her automobile ride into town to obtain more morphine. She confides in the girl, treating her like a childhood friend while plying her with Tyrone’s whiskey. She tells the servant about her early hopes and her romanticized first impressions of Tyrone. After Cathleen leaves to resume her duties, Tyrone and Edmund enter. Both have been drinking and continue to imbibe while Mary drifts through a reverie on Jamie’s alcoholism, her early married life on the itinerant hotel-hopping theater circuit, and her expensive satin wedding gown. When Tyrone leaves to fetch another bottle of whiskey, Edmund tries to tell his mother that he must enter a sanatorium, but she refuses to accept the truth, which, because her own father had died of consumption, she fears is a virtual death sentence. He voices wounding regret that he has “a dope fiend for a mother,” but is immediately contrite and hurries away. The act ends in a confrontation between Mary and Tyrone over Edmund’s condition. Mary refuses to eat dinner, claiming she is tired, and Tyrone then accuses her of slipping off to “take more of that God-damned poison.”

Act Four

It is around midnight. Tyrone, morose and almost lost in an alcoholic stupor, awkwardly attempts to play solitaire. Edmund enters, also drunk, and is immediately accused of “burning up money” by leaving the lights on behind him. Edmund attempts to defy his father, and is quick to defend his brother against his father’s ritual complaints about Jamie’s debauchery. Edmund then launches into a self-pitying conceit about being “a ghost within a ghost,” a soul lost in the comfort of the fog. His father only finds him morbid. Edmund continues, reciting depressing poetry and fueling his father’s anger. They begin to play Casino, but they are constantly distracted from the cards by their concern for Jamie and their fear that Mary will get up and come downstairs. They also continue to drink, reflect on their lives, and trade a mixture of recriminations and affectionate concerns for each other. They discuss Mary and her romantic distortions of the truth about her earlier life in the convent and her father’s wealth. Edmund then takes up Jamie’s theme of Tyrone’s stinginess, evident in Tyrone’s effort to find an inexpensive sanatorium for Edmund. Tyrone offers his familiar excuse, arguing that his family poverty and experience as a child laborer instilled in him a desperate fear of the poor house, turning him into “a stinking old miser.” He reveals his own deep regret that his fears led him to sacrifice his acting talent for a fixed but secure and very lucrative role in a popular melodrama. Edmund, in his turn, laments the loss of hope found in rare moments at sea, where life, however briefly, seemed to hold some meaning.

Jamie, drunk, lurches through the house and into the room as Tyrone, to avoid a confrontation, retires to the side porch. After recounting his adventure with Fat Violet in a local brothel, Jamie begins a painful confession in which he claims that his bitter resentment towards Edmund has caused him to try to drag Edmund into his own moral quicksand and turn him into a bum. He admits to having been jealous of Edmund and holding him responsible for Mary’s addiction. His love for his kid brother, though stronger than the hate, will not stop him from wanting to see Edmund fail.

When Jamie seems to fall asleep, Tyrone returns and begins his litany of complaints about his oldest son, but he is interrupted when Jamie starts up and begins returning fire with caustic, sneering innuendos.

The men, worn down by drink and a lack of sleep, soon begin to doze, but they quickly grow alert when they hear the piano begin a badly rendered Chopin waltz in a nearby room. Mary, carrying her wedding gown on her arm, then makes the entrance the men have dreaded. She is obviously in a narcotic-induced trance, barely aware of her surroundings. She begins a detached and vacant reverie on her childhood dreams and hopes. The men remain immobilized, making only feeble attempts to break through to her, vainly reciting lines of verse that underscore the helplessness of their situation. Mary’s reverie continues as the men sit quietly in their chairs and an indifferent curtain finally descends.