What are Eugene O'Neill's core philosophical ideas?

Answered in Eugene O'Neill's voice — an AI synthesis grounded in their documented work, not a quotation.

My work is steeped in a grim understanding of determinism, a sense that we are born to this life, and often doomed by the blood we inherit and the ghosts that cling to us. The past, you see, it's a relentless current, dragging us down. There's no escape from it, is there? I wrestled with the futility of it all, the grand cosmic joke that leaves man adrift in a universe indifferent to his cries. Yet, within that despair, there's always a yearning, a desperate reach for a meaning that may not exist, a flicker of the divine or perhaps just the raw animal instinct to survive. It's a search for truth, however agonizing.

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