FAMILY DISINTEGRATION IN ARTHUR MILLER’S ALL MY SONS, EUGENE O’NEILL’S LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT AND SAM SHEPARD’S BURIED CHILD

Abstract

The present research aims at shedding light on the issue of family dysfunction as portrayed by Miller, O’Neill and Shepard in a twentieth century American social context. The work deals with the theme of family disintegration, a phenomenon that affected the modern American society, where the ethics that forged the old successful American family started to vanish in an age of materialism, criminality and immorality. All My Sons, Long Day’s Journey into Night and Buried Child will be examined on the basis of Freud’s psychoanalytical theory to reveal the repressed familial ills that made up of the Kellers, the Tyrones and Dodge with his family a typical illustration of the disintegrated twentieth century American family whose past transgression of the law ruined their present existence. The research will focus on the cruciality of the past and its impact on people as explained by psychoanalysis. In fact, the outcome of the three families past incidents return back to haunt their present life which proved to be a failure. In addition, this work will dig into the repressed conscious vs unconscious mechanisms of the three plays’ characters in an attempt to decipher the hidden mysteries that led to the current fragmentation of family relationships. As for the theme of the Oedipus complex that is related to the Greek tragedy of the Oedipus Rex, this research will, eventually, tackle the topic of the father-son antagonism typically reflected in the enmity which exists among the three father figures and their male offspring depicted in all of All My Sons, Long Day’s Journey into Night and Buried Child. This research will therefore, attempt to explore the alarming phenomenon of the disintegrated American modern family that proved to be an utter disillusionment for the American Republic’s old sacred ideals of happiness, integration and unity on which the latter was forged.