Comparative Study dy dy


ANALYSE


Leaving Certificate Ordinary Level – Excellence in English Language and Literature


(ii) With reference to the same theme that you wrote about in part (i) of this question, write about an aspect of this theme that you fi nd either disturbing or reassuring in another text on your comparative course. You may refer to the same or a different aspect of the theme as you discussed in part (i). Support your answer by reference to the text.


(15)


(b) Some texts can contribute more than others to our understanding of a theme. Compare the extent to which at least two texts on your comparative course contributed to your understanding of the theme you discussed in 2. (a) above. Support your answer by reference to your chosen texts.


Mode: Social setting


Social setting in T e Playboy of the Western World Confl ict and violence


The action of The Playboy of the Western World centres on a violent act. The local people believe Christy Mahon killed his father and are delighted with the story, encouraging Christy to give as many details as possible. Micheal asks if Christy used a knife, saying ‘I’m told, in the big world, it’s bloody knives they use’. Pegeen asks if Christy hanged his father and graphically describes the way a neighbour hanged his dog ‘and had it screeching and wriggling three hours at the butt of a string’. Christy originally says he simply ‘riz the loy and let fall the edge of it on the ridge of his skull’, but when he realises that his audience admires violence, he changes it to deliberately hitting his father such a blow that he was ‘stretched out, and he split to the knob of his gullet’.


None of the locals stop to consider that murdering a man with a spade is a violent and gruesome act. Instead, they praise Christy for having the courage to do it. One of the men says Pegeen will be safer with ‘a man killed his own father holding danger from the door’. Synge portrays a society in which brutality and violence are equated with respectability and social worth.


Men and women in the text are equally fascinated with violence and equally guilty of it. Widow Quin is reputed to have killed her husband ‘with a rusty pick’ so that the rust would give him blood poisoning. Pegeen calls this ‘a sneaky kind of murder’ that ‘did win small glory with the boys itself’. The implication is clear: a more brutal and violent killing would have won the widow more respect.


The turning point in the play comes when the local people realise that Christy has not killed his father after all. They turn on him in disgust and Pegeen calls him a liar who only pretended to have his father ‘slitted’. Now that he is not a violent murderer, Christy is ‘nothing at all’ in Pegeen’s eyes.


Christy feels betrayed and humiliated by the reaction to his father’s appearance. He turns on the old man, chases him out of the house and appears to kill him in a fi ght. Now the locals see what they think is a real murder, and they are appalled. They see that a man slaying his father is a brutal act without any element of heroism. Pegeen says that there is a great difference between a ‘gallous story and a dirty deed’.


252


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