The major dramatic devices employed in the play are the soliloquy and the aside. A soliloquy is when a character is alone on stage and speaks his or her thoughts aloud. A dramatist uses this device to give the audience direct information about a character's motivation or state of mind. The convention is that the character always speaks the truth as he or she understands it. Acts One and Two both begin with long soliloquies by Marsden; Acts One and Five with a soliloquy by Nina; and act 4 with a soliloquy by Evans.

A related device is the aside, a convention in which a character speaks his or her thoughts aloud but these thoughts are inaudible to the other characters on the stage.

Both the soliloquy and the aside were staples of Elizabethan drama but fell into disuse in the nineteenth century. When O'Neill revived them...