Long Day's Journey contains the finest writing O'Neill ever did - and the fourth act is among the most powerful scenes in all dramatic literature. Here is a family living in a close symbiotic relationship, a single organism with four branches, where a twitch in one creates a spasm in another. The miser in Tyrone is also the source of Edmund's resentment, since Tyrone is preparing to send him to a State Farm for treatment instead of to a more expensive rest home. Each makes the other suffer through some unwitting act, a breach of love or faith, and reproaches follow furiously in the wake of every revelation. But even at the moment that the truth is being blurted out, an apologetic retraction is being formed.
Nobody really desires to hurt.
Compassion and understanding alternate with anger and rancor. Every torment is self-inflicted, each angry word reverberating in the conscience of the speaker. It is as if the characters existed only to torture each other, while protecting each other, too, against their own resentful tongues. There is a curse on the blighted house of the Tyrones, and the origin of the curse lies elsewhere, with existence itself. The generations merge, and so does Time.