Mother's bag of tricks: Irish folklore, tradition and identity in John McGahern's fiction

Alienation makes the heroes in John McGahern’s stories behave or appear like uncontrolled, wild and fearful creatures, anticipating a peril but unable to detect a precise danger and the way to counteract its impact. The demarcation between the safe and unsafe territory is even more difficult in circumstances related to death and funerals, as characters are transposed into a symbolically-built space where images, sounds, colours, and domestic totems help or restrain them, linking the visible to the subconscious. Diverse motifs from the animal, vegetal or human realms, are accompanied by a panoply of stylistic means employed to take the readership into a genuine Irish setting in which animal representations often mirror feelings of numerous humans, from hope to despair, or frailty to rigidity. This paper aims to explore the way in which folklore-extracted elements shape Irish identity and recurrently emerge in McGahern’s literary works, the result being a unique mixture of imagery and personal memories implanted in both content and narrative.