"Grave of the images of dead passions and their days": "The country funeral" as McGahern's poetic tombeau
This paper first examines the symbolic filiation between the character of Gabriel in “The Dead” and the figure of Philly Ryan in the short story. Both characters go through the sobering experience of shedding the idealised self-images which helped them to go through life so far. However, Philly actu...
Αποθηκεύτηκε σε:
| Τόπος έκδοσης: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Κύριος συγγραφέας: | |
| Μορφή: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Έκδοση: |
Journal of the Short Story in English
2010
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| Διαθέσιμο Online: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Περίληψη: | This paper first examines the symbolic filiation between the character of Gabriel in “The Dead” and the figure of Philly Ryan in the short story. Both characters go through the sobering experience of shedding the idealised self-images which helped them to go through life so far. However, Philly actually returns to the Gloria Bog to start a new life by taking in at Peter’s farm. Then it makes the point that the image of Uncle Peter and his matchsticks could well be interpreted as a reflexive comment on the ethics of writing, if we agree to see it as one of McGahern’s successful “lost images”, to the extent that they enable him to come to terms with the repetition of the symptoms of his melancholy by displacing them through a succession of images endowed with a poetic quality. |
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