Episode 40: The Tragic Vision of Eugene O'Neill

In this episode, I speak with the journalist Damon Linker about the Pulitzer prize winning American playwright, Eugene O'Neill. Our conversation mostly centers around A Long Day's Journey Into Night, the semi-autobiographical account of the tortured dynamics within in his own family. We discuss O'Neill's uniquely Catholic variety of atheism, of how his work resonates with themes from Simone Weil, in her essay, "Literature and Morals," the difference between a transcendence that orders the self to the good and the transcendence that is ordered towards the obliteration of the self, and finally, O'Neill's his tragic vision of the human person.