Sense of Guilt Barely Dodged:

<p>Finished after a long and stressful revising, Days Without End turned out to be an unsatisfactory play, in box office as well as among critics. As is made clear by checking the drafts and other pre-publication materials, O’Neill had a hard time forging a convincing ending to the play. The core of the problem is embodied in the fictional hero’s project of manipulating the course of his life by an autobiographical novel he wrote. And behind the project lurks the hero’s wish for his wife’s death. Through his on-going adultery he has betrayed her, who by his passionate paean of love he helped out of despair in love she suffered in her former marriage. Strangely enough, he is divided between the diabolical wish and a combination of a grave sense of guilt for the betrayal and a wish to live forgiven and loved again by the wife herself. And to undermine his guilt-ridden conscience urging his death, the hero manages to concoct a deal with the Crucifix, making his all too convenient wish come true. Inivetably, this whole complicated fictional situation evokes that of O’Neill’s real life after his betrayal of his second wife, Agnes Boulton. And the fictional hero’s struggles fairly correspond with O’Neill’s realistic ones, both as an artist and as a man, an analogy suggesting that his writing of the play Days Without End itself corresponds with the hero’s search for a wishful handling of his situation. The play cannot fail to be taken as autobiographical. No doubt based upon O’Neill’s innermost Catholic sentiments and amply imbued with religious motifs, Days Without End is now less about returning to Catholicism, freed from self, or achieving a higher level of understanding of man, as it has been read. It is more about “the writer character” trying to manipulate reality by “the book he wrote.” The play represents O’Neill’s unabashed quasi-religious assertion that his own life at this stage is an ideal guide for the modern man inescapably divided against himself. And it is a bungled forerunner of The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night in O’Neill’s search for his innermost personal truth.</p>