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Home sickness: John McGahern's Irish quartet
Abstract
John McGahern is regarded as one of the finest contemporary prose writers in Ireland. His novels and short stories are praised for their depictions of family life in rural Ireland during the middle decades of this century. And while the name of the family changes in many of his works, most critics agree that McGahern is writing about the history of one family in his Counties Roscommon-Leitrim stories. To connect his novels, McGahern employs stylistic features and thematic treatments similar to those of George Moore, W. B. Yeats and James Joyce. Drawing from these writers, and others, McGahern, in his first four novels, tells the story of a young boy growing up in rural Ireland--an Ireland controlled by a dominant patriarchy. McGahern's protagonists, Willie in The Barracks (1963), Mahoney in The Dark (1965), Patrick Moran in The Leavetaking (1974), and the nameless narrator in The Pornographer (1979) become one and the same. They are all the young man searching for a new life in Ireland but too often encountering the darkness found in Moore and Joyce. At the close of his quartet, however, McGahern's central character finds his way back home. Like Gabriel, in "The Dead," who decides to "set out on his journey westward," McGahern's protagonist realizes life cannot be a series of continual leavetakings from his problems. His epiphany is to see that he has let the "light of imagination almost out." As a result he decides to return to rural Ireland, to "make a go of it." Eleven years after completing his quartet, McGahern, in his fifth novel, Amongst Women (1990), returns to the same family so he can tell the story of the women in rural Ireland whose lives were also submerged under a dominant patriarchy. The dissertation, then, traces McGahern's refrain as he tells the story of that rural Irish family, and also places his novels within a literary and historical Irish context.
Subject Area
Literature|British and Irish literature
Recommended Citation
Lloyd, Richard Burr, "Home sickness: John McGahern's Irish quartet" (1995). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9528752.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9528752