Long Day's Journey Into Night Fate and Free Will

This is the first of Mary's many fatalistic conclusions. The argument is basically this: since things have happened in the past, we can't be blamed for expecting them to happen again. This makes sense in the abstract, but the problem is that it takes away a person's agency if the event actually can be prevented from happening again. Mary has taken away the possibility of human intervention from her equation. There's simply no way to forget the past, and so it must dictate the future.

Once again, under the influence of morphine, Mary abandons the blame game and turns to fatalism. She recognizes that getting mad at Jamie logically leads to her blaming herself for poor decisions she made in her past (such as, perhaps, marrying James or getting pregnant with Edmund). That's why she says you lose your true self – she attributes the blame of her past actions to a self that wasn't actually her, but necessarily had to come about due to prior decisions.

Poor Nietzsche always gets a bad rap for encouraging apathy, when in reality his philosophies were all about encouraging people to take control of their own life and do something. Sounds like the opposite of apathy to us.

In one of the most upsetting moments in the play, Mary finally cracks under James's critical gaze, and confesses to her return to morphine. More to the point, though, we see here the rationale for her constant resort to fate as an explanation for all the ills in her life. We want to believe her when she says she has tried so hard not to get back on morphine, but no matter how hard she tries, she can't kick it.

Where previously the agent behind Mary's fatalism was some sort of abstract concept like "the effects life has on you" and a more general appeal to the way people work, here she makes her fatalist argument much more concretely. Here, doctors (specifically Doctor Hardy) are the ones responsible for people's sealed fates. Hardy is an agent of destiny, getting Mary hooked on morphine leaving her without any power to resist.

A fun bit of hypocrisy from James here. He argues that Mary ought to have had more faith in God so that she would have been able to pull through. Of course, what James fails to acknowledge is that he's had a hand in shaking that faith in God by taking her away from the convent. Like Mary, James consistently underestimates the role of his own activities in bringing about the disasters facing his family.

This passage, coming at the end of Act III, gives us a chilling bit of (false!) foreshadowing. It's hard to read this and not expect Mary to end up dead in Act IV. At the same time, it's a reminder of her failed suicide attempt when she tried to jump off the dock. At the most basic level, though, the passage shows us Mary's strange relationship with fate. She clearly wants to die, but refuses to go after her goal willingly. The only acceptable way for her to achieve the happiness she sees in death would be if fate so willed it. She seems to regard the amount of morphine she takes as out of her control.

Hint: if you ever see this quote (from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar) in a work of literature, you can be sure that fate versus free will is a key theme. This is basically the mother of all fate vs. free will quotes in all of literature. Cassius, in Shakespeare's play, urges Brutus to take responsibility and quit thinking that fate dictates all actions. In other words, when something goes wrong, it's our fault, and the only way for us to fix it is through positive action. James advocates this philosophy, and it stands in contrast with that often supported by Jamie and Mary, who both argue what has happened has shaped what will happen, and we have no control over the process.

Jamie may be joking, but this jest betrays a real philosophical concern of this play that maybe money greases the wheels of fate. In other words, all this talk about fate may really be a more abstract way of saying that a person's place in society determines how happy he can be. Jamie doesn't seem to be a believer in the whole "money can't buy you happiness" idea.

Cool literary reference here, as Jamie brings up a great poem, Oscar Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol." In this poem, Wilde writes about a man threatened to death for killing his wife. He writes: "The man had killed the thing he loved / And so he had to die." Here Jamie inverts the causality. Instead, once you die on the inside, as Jamie has, you lose control of yourself, and are forced to kill the thing he loved (i.e., Edmund).