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Analysis Of Eugene O 'Neill's PlayThe Emperor Jones'

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Eugene O’Neill is widely considered the most influential of American playwrights. He is called the “founder of modern drama in the United States”, and holds the title of the first American playwright to earn a Nobel Prize in literature. (O’ Neill 794) His play, The Emperor Jones, is credited as being one that provided” several firsts in American theatre history: the Provincetown Players first major hit, the first major role for an African American actor on the legitimate Broadway stage (in houses where the audience was still racially segregated), and the play that secured O’Neill’s place as a writer for the high-art, experimental theatre worthy of international attention. (Steen 343) Basically, The Emperor Jones made Eugene O’Neill.

The play is a psychological study of Brutus Jone’s mind, his fears, visions and dream. “Tom- tom is part and parcel of the psychological action; at first it is the call to war ; then it merges into the Emperor Jones’ vision of the slaves working to its beat; finally it becomes is own throbbing, feverish temples, all the while it’s our heart beating more and more rapidly as we follow his fate. “lastly the Tom- tom is a symbol of man’s last heart beat, death the consciousness of Jones has been presented through the cinematographic technique of the flashback fusing the past and present. Here symbol and psychology merge and the whole play is a long drama. Emperor Jones represents the breakdown of a Negroid mentally under the stress of fear and

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