Eugene O’Neill’s Days Without End is a play that I believe works as an example for one of my personally-created beliefs in literary theory. I believe that a work of literary fiction can be great in three major ways: plot structure, characters, and language. For a literary work to be at all successful, I believe that it has to succeed in one of these requisites. However, there is a fourth category of success, which I believe that, if a work succeeds in only this category, belies it to be a work of either extreme mediocrity, or just bad. This category is how interesting or avant-garde the concept of the work is. And if the concept behind the work of fiction is great, yet it succeeds nowhere in its execution in the previously named three ways, it is still not a good work. Days Without End is the pinnacle of this example: it has a very interesting concept with lots of baseline potential, and succeeds nowhere in its execution of it. 

     The plot revolves around the characters John and Loving, where Loving is a figment of John’s imagination who sometimes interjects with a hateful or antagonistic speech in John’s voice, effectively acting as a Hyde to John’s Jekyll. In this way, whenever John tries to have a conversation with someone, Loving (John’s dark side) interjects and suddenly makes the whole interaction very unpleasant. At first, this dynamic was very interesting. I remember almost feeling jumpscared whenever I saw that it was Loving’s line, and I would realize that the whole conversation was about to turn South. However, eventually Loving’s interjections become commonplace, and the play begins to fall apart. We learn over time that John is married to a woman named Elsa, and John cheated on Elsa, causing Loving to form out of his guilt. However, the part where Elsa figures it out and forgives him pretty soon after feels very rushed and malformed, and overall, as the play progresses, every single character begins feeling very hollow and plastic in an indescribable way. The last scene of the play is John praying to a large cross which causes Loving to immediately die, which, to speak plain truth, made me wince and grit my teeth through the unabashed hollowness of it all. Days Without End is nearly an infuriating play to read, since the concept is so good, but the plot structure, characters, and diction is so shockingly bad for Eugene O’Neill. Overall, I highly do not recommend Days Without End, especially when there are other O’Neill plays from the same time period which he clearly put so much more effort into (referring to you, Ah, Wilderness!).