关键词: 尤金·奥尼尔; 戏剧; 宗教; 信仰; 伦理叙事

Abstract:

The American playwright Eugene O’Neill is known as a sentimental and complicated person whose dramas, based on his personalized repentance and tragic narrative as well as the individual’s inner conflicts, interrogate the sinking souls and show his concern over the people’s life crisis and spiritual alienation and seek in the chaos and abyss of human nature a home for the soul. By probing into his life and interpreting his dramas, the author of the paper attempts to extricate from the previous preconceived judgment in text analysis and hopes to search for the underlying motivation of O’Neill’s spiritual trauma and soul narrative so as to achieve an interactive and objective interpretation of O’Neill’s dramas by combining O’Neill’s personal experience with his individual life narrative. With the research, the author puts forward that O’Neill’s narrative is ethical and inseparable from his religious belief. O’Neill has spent his whole life struggling for and pursuing spiritual support and expressed in his dramas the suffering, hesitation and contradiction brought about by his abandonment of the religious faith, and the redemption of the sinking soul. To have a profound insight into O’Neill’s spiritual pilgrim may help us to better understand his ethical narrative and ethical selection, and in particular to see a true O’Neill and his religious complex through his literary writings.

Keywords: Eugene O'Neill; dramas; religion; faith; ethical narrative