Eugene O’Neill’s Days Without End: Its Gratuitous Multiple Personality Suggests the Author’s Personal Experience

Days Without End (1934) (1) begins in John Loving’s private office, where he is writing a novel. John, and his alternate personality, Loving, are played by two different actors. The actor playing Loving wears a mask, which looks like John, but has a scornful, mocking expression.

John and Loving—who see and hear each other—discuss the plot of the novel, until Bill Eliot, John Loving’s business partner, enters the office. Eliot, and all the rest of the characters in the play, do not see or hear Loving (only John and the audience do).

The protagonist’s dramatized, split personality continues throughout the play until the last page, at which point John accepts God, his alternate personality dies, and John becomes John Loving.

The play has been reviewed three ways. The first approach is to mostly ignore the split personality, and to focus instead on the other issues which occupy the characters: marital infidelity, belief in God, and love. The second approach is to denounce the split personality as a stupid gimmick. The third approach is to recognize the split personality as “a hallmark” of O’Neill’s plays, and as part of “the tradition of the split character in modern American and British drama” (2).

Days Without End is “patently autobiographical”; it describes O’Neill’s “own spiritual-intellectual peregrinations”; and John Loving “is a persona for the playwright” (3). But if the play is patently autobiographical, why don’t any of the reviewers infer that O’Neill had multiple personality?

The main thing that strikes me about this play is that the multiple personality of the protagonist is totally unnecessary, unless that was the main issue that O’Neill wanted to dramatize. If it wasn’t, then it is one more example of what I have called “gratuitous multiple personality,” which is multiple personality that is included in works of fiction for no other reason than that it was part of the author’s personal experience.

One last comment. O’Neill ends the play by killing off the alternate personality, as though alters were demons and the way to deal with them is exorcism. Alters are not demons. They are part of the person’s total personality. Cooperation or integration may work. But alters that you think you have exorcised are just lying low.

1. Eugene O’Neill. Complete Plays 1932-1943. The Library of America, 1988.

2. Albert Wertheim. “Eugene O’Neill’s Days Without End and the Tradition of the Split Character in Modern American and British Drama,” in Frederick Wilkins (Ed.), The Eugene O’Neill Newsletter, Vol. VI, No. 3, Winter, 1982.

3. John Henry Raleigh. The Plays of Eugene O’Neill. Southern Illinois University Press, 1965, p. 6.