THIS PAPER TRACES Eugene O'Neill's treatment of despairing human consciousness throughout his dramatic career, focusing both on the unchanging characteristics of human beings in despair and on O'Neill's changing treatment of these despairing individuals. O'Neill consistently presents despair as a state of mind that grows naturally out of disobedience, idleness, pride, anger, and self-contempt; and he sees clearly the limitations of human "pleasures," rages over these limitations, is under the control of demonic forces, and finally tempts man to suicide. Further, his method of presenting this increasingly familiar blackening of human consciousness and his characters' responses to this blackness is often startlingly original.
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