Comparison of Eugene O'Neill's "Long Days Journey into Night" and Ralf Ellison's "Invisible Man"

Henry David Thoreau stated, " The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." The quiet desperation that Thoreau speaks of is the drive from within to be something more and yet be almost nothing at all. He believes that to obtain personal success that you must separate yourself from society and civilization. Men who are not at this stage in life where they are free from the society that binds you are secretly desperate to …

…part of society. He understood that to be a part of society was to lie to yourself about the way of they world. The family in "Long Day's Journey into Night" will never seem to some to this acceptance. Instead, they choose to lead their quiet lives of desperation in fear that anything else may socially kill them. Unfortunately they to not know that to be socially dead is to be intellectually and emotionally alive.