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Letting the Dead be Dead: A Reinterpretation of A Moon for the Misbegotten

O'Neill organizes A Moon for the Misbegotten not around Jim Tyrone, as most interpreters believe, but around Josie Hogan. The play's central dramatic action occurs in the growth we witness in Josie's understanding of Jim, herself, and the world. The action of the play is the process of mourning: not, primarily, the unending mourning of Jim for his mother, but the mourning of Josie for Jim, who dies to her during the course of the play, and whose deadness Josie eventually accepts. I Jim gains little peace or "insight" from his third act confession. The "salvation," or "forgiveness" Josie gives him is mainly significant in its meaning to Josie. We must take Jim seriously when he insists that he is "dead": he cannot grow, feel, love, or do anything except, by drinking himself to death, send his body to join his soul and his mother.