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This essay discusses the irony of ‘interior monologue’ shown in Eugene O’Neill's Strange Interlude. Almost experimental in its form and technique, this epic psychological drama was O’Neill’s greatest achievement in the 1920s and the dramatist was awarded his third Pulitzer Prize for this play. While some critics deplored its melodramatic aspects and sensationalism, it did receive favorable notices. The strength of the play lies in its characterizations and what O’Neill accomplished through the use of thought asides. These were far more comprehensible and meaningful than the masks in The Great God Brown. In a sense this play was an attempt at the new masked psychological drama without masks. Most were aware of the author’s attempt to explore the depths of the inner being, the dark side of the self. Primarily, however, they were captivated by the characters of Nina, one of O’Neill’s most fascinating female creations. During nine acts lasting several hours, the leading character, Nina Leeds, and the people surrounding her reveal themselves and analyze each other. The play recounts Nina’s life and her desperate search to find fulfillment and meaning after the death of the one man she truly loved. The length of the play, its epic intentions, and its experimental technique made it most memorable production of its time. We discover that both the asides and the length of Strange Interlude are dictated by a psychological need―to delay, to avoid coming to grips with reality. The function of the asides is to cushion the action and make it oblique. And this same obliqueness creates the need of spreading the story over nine long acts. O’Neill presented both the external action of his characters and their inner thoughts and torments. To do this, he invented the “interior monologue.” The asides and soliloquies are used more boldly and freely than ever―they constitute over a third of what the audience hears―to give voice to the characters’ secret thoughts. Time and again the asides heighten the emotion or significance of a scene, provide ironic contrast, or add to a characterization; equally often, though, they seem either repetitious, telling us what we already know, or merely an easy way for the author to get across exposition he should have woven unobtrusively into the dialogue. The mask-face dichotomy in The Great God Brown represents the character’s public and private images, what they pretend to be opposed to what they really are. Strange Interlude conveys the same idea about its characters’ schism, but it relies on thought asides to do so. As a dramatic technique, the asides and soliloquies offered something for easy discussion and for prediction concerning the future of the theatre. The play’s narrative, which dealt so frankly, even clinically, with matters of abortion and adultery, gave the play a success of scandal. Each character speaks both his public and his private thoughts, a device which allows the play to develop on two levels. The interior monologues characters use essentially cause strong irony. Usually they produce comic irony. Therefore a brilliant trick of irony using interior monologue is the life of this play.

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키워드

저자

• 박용남 [ Park Yong-Nam | 고려대학교 ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  영어영문학연구 [The Jungang Journal of English Language and Literature]

• 간기

  계간

• pISSN

  1598-3293

• 수록기간

  1968~2025

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 840 DDC 810