Notes On The Stoat 3u6z5l

Notes on the stoat In The Stoat by John McGahern we have the theme of selfishness, fear, responsibility, rejection and honesty. Narrated in the third person by an unnamed narrator the reader realizes after reading the story that McGahern may be exploring the theme of selfishness. The protagonist’s father on hearing that Miss McCabe has had a heart attack decides to abandon any notions he had of getting engaged to Miss McCabe. It is as though the protagonist’s father doesn’t want to care for Miss McCabe should the need arise. This may be important as it suggests that the protagonist’s father is being selfish. Thinking only of his own feelings rather than on how Miss McCabe may feel. It seems to be a case that if the focus is not on him he does not want to get engaged to or marry Miss McCabe. If anything Miss McCabe has become a liability rather than an asset to the protagonist’s father. It is also possible that the protagonist’s father fears the outcome should he end up marrying Miss McCabe. He has already buried one wife and may not wish to have to bury a second. Miss McCabe is no longer of any use to the protagonist’s father and as mentioned she has become a liability. Where previously the protagonist’s father had been happy to get engaged to Miss McCabe this is no longer the case. Driven by his own sense of importance the protagonist’s father decides to go back home without discussing the break-up with Miss McCabe. If anything the protagonist’s father is not taking responsibility for his actions. It would be more appropriate for him to be honest with Miss McCabe rather than simply abandoning her without any type of explanation. Not only is the protagonist’s father acting selfishly but he is also avoiding having to tell Miss McCabe as to why he no longer has any interest in seeing her or getting engaged. His actions lack any type of honesty. Similarly his fears that he may have to take care of Miss McCabe suggest that the most important person in the protagonist’s father’s life is himself. He had been seeking companionship however everything must be on his . Something that is noticeable by fact that the protagonist’s father was unhappy with many of the women that he had seen before he choose Ms McCabe. It is possible that the other women may have been too much work for the protagonist’s father. He is looking for something easy in life without having to put too much effort in. Miss McCabe fits the bill till she has a heart attack. Though the protagonist’s father has every right to choose the woman he wishes to marry some critics might suggest he is acting spinelessly by abandoning or rejecting Miss McCabe. It may also be a case that the protagonist is rejecting his father (and Miss McCabe). Something that is noticeable by the protagonist’s desire to ‘avoid the trout dinner and anything more got to do with them.’ As to why the protagonist wishes to reject his father and Miss McCabe is uncertain. He may have tired of their interaction with one another. Where previously he had no objection to his father finding female companionship. The protagonist has now changed his mind. The protagonist’s relationship with his uncle is also interesting as he appears to have more constructive dialogue with him than he does with his father. Throughout the story the father has been concerned only with his own goal of finding a companion. Whereas it seems his uncle listens to him. Something that is noticeable by the fact that they go on a four-mile walk together and then go to the Grand Central for a drink. It is as though both the protagonist and his uncle share common interests not only professionally but personally too. The end of the story is also interesting as McGahern repeats a paragraph. This may be important as McGahern could be suggesting that just as the stoat will kill again so too symbolically will the protagonist’s father. Just as the stoat has killed the rabbit. The protagonist’s father has killed off his relationship with Miss McCabe and he may do so with any other woman that does not match the strict criteria that the protagonist’s father has set out. Though the protagonist’s father is looking for companionship he also seems to be looking for perfection yet he is not able to offer this himself. As a man he is flawed. He has abandoned Miss McCabe for no other reason apart from the fact she had a

heart attack. The standard that the protagonist’s father has set and which many women have not been able to attain in all possibility may not be realistic. The protagonist’s father himself has very little to offer. He is stuck in his ways something that is noticeable by his reading habits when it comes to the newspaper. Yet the woman that the protagonist’s father seeks must be able to accommodate his idiosyncratic way of living and at the same time have no quirks of note themselves. Again the protagonist’s father is a selfish man who thinks only of himself. If the woman does not tick all the right boxes the protagonist’s father doesn’t want to know. Yet he cannot tick some of the boxes himself. Source: The Sitting Bee http://sittingbee.com/the-stoat-john-mcgahern/

More notes on the Stoat

On the page McGahern is a realist, and some consider him conservative, but taken collectively the stories have an experimental edge, or at least a strange one. Consider the way he reuses certain characters, most notably an emotionally abusive farmer and his second wife, Rose, who appear prominently in the stories Wheels, Sierra Leone and Gold Watch, and are mentioned in several others. In each of these stories the narrator visits from Dublin and clashes with the father. Yet Rose, the farmer and the returning son are not intended to be the same characters from story to story. Rather they are archetypes of some kind, and through its repetition the struggle enacted in each story comes to seem like some eternal battle from myth. The father is there from the beginning, incarnated as a Garda sergeant in McGahern's first novel, The Barracks (1963). At the time Anthony Burgess said the book "has caught so well the peculiar hopelessness of contemporary Ireland", and it is true that a strand of hopelessness runs throughout McGahern's work. As Nicholas Wroe notes, "the horrors are always there in McGahern", even if they are of a quiet, despairing sort, as when a hungover and jilted man looks on a Dublin street: There were five steps up to each house. The stone was granite. Many of the iron railings were painted blue. Across the street was a dishevelled lilac bush. They'd taught us to notice such things when young. They said it was the world. Or when a teacher (McGahern's occupation before his second novel, The Dark, was banned, and he was driven from Ireland) stares out of the classroom window, willing three o'clock: Outside, the three stone walls of the playground run down to the lake, the centre wall broken by the concrete lavatory, above it the rapid sparkle of pinpoint flashes of sunlight on the wings of the blackdust swarm of flies; and on the windowsill in a jam jar a fistful of primroses some child has gathered from the May banks. In the stream of sunlight across the blackboard the chalkdust floats, millions of white grains, breathed in and out all day, found at night in the turnups of tros, all the aridity of this empty trade.

Or when a priest re his mother's descent into senility: … and then the day came when he had to it that she no longer knew who he was, had become like a dog kennelled out too long. This is brutal material in its way, and McGahern's dark energies are nowhere more forcefully expressed than in the extraordinary Hearts of Oak, Bellies of Brass (1970). Collecting his pay after another punishing day of shovelling on a London building site, the narrator reflects: I love to count out in money the hours of my one and precious life. I sell the hours and I get money. The money allows me to sell more hours. If I saved money I could buy the hours of some similar bastard and live like a royal incubus, which would suit me much better than the way I am now, though apparently even as I am now suits me well enough, since I do not want to die. The men labour, drink, and "go round to Marge and Kathleen", prostitutes who live "in the condemned row, moving from empty house to empty house ahead of the demolition. Limp rubbers floated in the gutters Monday mornings while they slept in the daylight." It is a cycle seemingly without meaning or end, one of many that confirms the wheel as the central image of McGahern's work: the identification of life as a recurrent pattern. In Parachutes it reappears as a depressive's vision: It was as if we were looking down a long institutional corridor; the child in the feeding chair could be seen already, the next child, and the next … the lawnmowers in summer, the thickening waists. It hardly seemed necessary to live it. From McGahern's earliest books there is an extraordinary grace and power to his descriptive writing, particularly of landscape. (Dublin does not receive the same careful attention, and remains – perhaps intentionally – insubstantial.) His descriptive abilities grew as he continued to labour at his style, culminating in the descriptions of Gloria Bog in The Country Funeral, located in the heart of the territory where so many of his stories take place. He describes the bog with great beauty and plainness of language, first at dusk: Without any warning, suddenly, they were out of the screen of small trees into the open bog. A low red sun west of Killeelan was spilling over the sedge and dark heather. Long shadows stretched out from the small birches scattered all over the bog. And then at night: It was a clear moonlit night without a murmur of wind, and the acres of pale sedge were all lit up, giving back much of the light it was receiving, so that the places that were covered with heather melted into a soft blackness and the scattered shadows of the small birches were soft and dark on the cold sedge. If you have not read McGahern before these ages may seem unremarkable. I suspect their effect, and that of his prose generally, depends in part on repetition, its wheeling

returns to the same places, the same people, the same situations, and that its impact grows with each repetition just as a ritual accretes meaning the more it is performed. Beneath these descriptions of Gloria Bog lies the sediment of his many other evocations of Leitrim, a landscape he recreated with the persistence of Paul Cézanne painting Mont SainteVictoire. "My only concern", as McGahern once said, "is that I get the sentence right and describe my world clearly and deeply." Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/24/short-story-johnmcgahern Character Analysis McGahern is rightly praised for the power of his characters trapped in bleak circumstances in rural painstaking detail, McGahern could summon the make up so much of life in a rural place. To get a the opening of his first novel, The Barracks.

descriptions, in particular his descriptions of Ireland. Through sonorous language and with mood of a place and the daily routines that sense of his style, consider this age from

The bright golds and scarlets of the religious pictures on the walls had faded, their glass glittered now in the sudden flashes of firelight, and as it deepened the dusk turned reddish from the Sacred Heart lamp that burned before the small wickerwork crib of Bethlehem on the mantlepiece. Only the cups and saucers laid ready on the table for their father’s tea were white and brilliant. The wind and rain rattling on the window-panes seemed to grow part of the spell of silence and increasing darkness, the spell of the long darning-needle flashing in the woman’s hand, and it was with a visible strain that the boy managed at last to break their fear of the coming night. “Is it time to light the lamp yet, Elizabeth?” he asked. (The Barracks, p. 7, Penguin Books) An almost identical description appears at the very end of the book. By then, the step-mother, Elizabeth, has ed away; the father, Ned Reegan, an Irish guard, has confronted his watchful boss, Quirke; and the children’s interest in preparing for darkness by lighting lamps and lowering blinds suggests the continuation of life, even quotidian life, after the death of the novel’s central figure. Such repetition isn’t surprising in a long work like a novel. But it can be daring, even jarring, in a shorter work such as a nine-page story. McGahern’s story, “The Stoat,” which appears in Ireland: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, begins with the narrator, a golfer, discovering a rabbit which has just been attacked by a stoat. I was following a two iron I had just struck just short of the green when I heard the crying high in the rough grass above the fairway. The clubs rattled as I climbed towards the sound, but it did not cease, its pitch rising. The light of water from the inlet was blinding when I climbed out of the grass, and I did not see the rabbit at once, where it sat rigidly still on a bare patch of a loose sand, crying. I was standing over the rabbit when I saw the grey body of the stoat slithering away like a snake into the long grass. The rabbit still did not move, but its crying ceased. I saw the wet slick of blood behind its ear, the blood pumping out on the sand. It did not stir when I stooped.

What follows is a graphic and gripping description of the injured rabbit and the rapacious pursuit by the stoat. And then the story shifts to its main action, which concerns the narrator’s father, a fifty-year-old widower and schoolteacher, who has placed an ad in the paper, looking for a mate. A grim little comedy follows, and McGahern shows that his descriptive power works as well in miniature as it does in large. Teacher, fifty-two. Seeks companionship. View marriage.“What do you think of it?” he asked. “I think it’s fine.” Dismay cancelled a sudden wild impulse to roar with laughter. “I’ll send it off, then, so.” After about a month he showed me the response. A large pile of envelopes lay on his desk. I was amazed. I had no idea that so much unfulfilled longing wandered around in the world. Replies came from nurses, housekeepers, secretaries, childless widows, widows with small children, house owners, car owners, pensioners, teachers, civil servants, a policewoman, and a woman who had left at twenty years of age to work at Fords of Dagenham who wanted to come home. The postman inquired slyly if the school was seeking a new assistant, and the woman who ran the post office said in a faraway voice that if we were looking for a housekeeper she had a relative who might be interested. (I love the detail of the woman in the post office remarking about her relative in “a faraway voice.” Perfect.) Eventually, the father’s attentions focus on a Miss McCabe. The son accompanies the father to a meeting with Miss McCabe in the lobby of the Ormond Hotel. She was small and frail and nervous, a nervousness that extended, I suspected, well beyond the awkwardness and unease of the whole contrived meeting. There was something about her—a waif-like sense of decency—that was at once appealing and troubling. Though old, she was like a girl in love, in love with being in love a whole life long without ever settling on any single demanding presence until this late backward glance fell on my bereft but seeking father. Dinner follows, and a sort of unspoken engagement.

Source: http://whereaboutspress.com/blog/?tag=the-stoat