Legends of the fall: John McGahern's "Christmas" and "The creamery manager"
This paper examines the continuities of theme and meaning that unite McGahern’s early story “Christmas” and his much later story “The Creamery Manager”. Both reveal a strain of stoicicism that informs McGahern’s entire narrative practice. These and many of McGahern’s other stories record the social...
Enregistré dans:
| Dans: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
|---|---|
| Auteur principal: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Publié: |
Journal of the Short Story in English
2010
|
| Accès en ligne: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | This paper examines the continuities of theme and meaning that unite McGahern’s early story “Christmas” and his much later story “The Creamery Manager”. Both reveal a strain of stoicicism that informs McGahern’s entire narrative practice. These and many of McGahern’s other stories record the social and metaphysical loneliness of the man in the crowd, and the desperation at the heart of what is called happiness. Typically, McGahern contextualizes and localizes this existential unease within a mid-twentieth century rural Irish society which is both socially conservative and religiously oppressive. The stories are controlled and compact; they avoid large dramatic gestures and catastrophes. In their place, McGahern offers temperate ironies, cool understatements, and low-keyed evidence of characters who have the ability to endure and survive, despite the fullness of their knowledge of life’s defects and deficiencies |
|---|