McGahern’s Lear, or: Tragedy in the Barracks

Abstract

John McGahern’s fiction incorporates many references and allusions to Shakespeare’s plays. This essay looks at McGahern’s use for the tragedies, and particularly King Lear, throughout his career. His novels and short stories regularly rework the Shakespearean trope that ‘all the world’s a stage’, as many of his characters dramatize themselves in terms that recall the suffering of tragic Shakespearean heroes. This is demonstrated with particular reference to The Barracks, a novel that opens with an extended intertextual homage to King Lear. The same novel also makes the converse point, though, by demonstrating how the suffering of Elizabeth Reegan may indeed share the magnitude of that of Lear. The second section is focused on the continuing presence of echoes and allusions to that same tragedy in Amongst Women and That They May Face the Rising Sun. It concludes with a discussion of the description of Moran’s death at the end of Amongst Women which argues (drawing partly on T.S. Eliot’s Shakespeare criticism) that this passage contains a metafictional commentary on the nature of conventional tragic deaths in Shakespeare’s plays. The contention is that the way Moran chooses to die is significant for its resistance of the ‘dramatic’ impulse that characterised the actions of many of McGahern’s earlier characters, as well as that of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes.