The Concept of ¨Bad Faith¨ in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956) and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?(1962)
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Date
2024
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Université Mouloud Mammeri Tizi Ouzou
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the concept of bad faith in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? . The objective of this study is to examine bad faith through character’s decisions, language, behaviour and situations. It attempts to discuss the reasons that lead characters to act in bad faith, and the consequences it has on their personality, identity, and belief. This dessertation relies on Jean Paul Sartre’s concept of Bad Faith in Being and Nothingness 1943. Throughout this analysis, we have conculuded that people use bad faith to deny their existential reality, there by denying their freedom and responsability through living in denial or living in the past to forget the moment present. We have analysed through Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness 1943, the different ways that lead a person to live inauthentically and the consequences it has in humans lives . This research explores how the characters in both works construct self -deception to avoid confronting their freedom, responsibility and despair. In O’Neill’s Tyrone family, bad faith manifests in addiction, nostalgia and the relentless performance of familial roles. In Albee’s George and Martha, it takes the form of illusion, verbal warfare and the refusal to acknowledge existential emptiness. By tracing these mechanisms of denial and disavowal, the dessertation reflects on the author’s own encounters with self-deception and the challenge of living authentically. By combining literary analysis with personal reflection, this work explores how people either avoid or confront the painful reality of freedom in a world lacking inherent meaning.
Description
62p. ; (+CD-Rom)
Keywords
Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee, Bad Faith, Jean-Paul Sartre
Citation
Literature and Interdisciplinary Approaches