Single Text
Leaving Certificate Ordinary Level – Excellence in English Language and Literature
Heroism
For the people of rural Mayo – particularly Pegeen – meeting a real hero is something greatly to be desired. Pegeen scorns the local men and wishes for ‘the like of Daneen Sullivan knocked the eye from a peeler’ or Marcus Quin who could ‘tell stories of holy Ireland till he’d have the old women shedding down tears about their feet’. They live dull, humdrum lives and when Christy appears with his story of having murdered his father, the local people think highly of him. They do not care
about the crime: their focus is on a man brave enough to stand up for himself.
However, they have a false idea of the brave hero. In reality, Christy hit his father and ran away without even stopping to check if the older man was dead. Pegeen sees Christy as being like one of the heroes of old: ‘it’s the poets are your like, fi ne fi ery fellows with great rages when their temper’s roused’.
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. In this way, Synge shows us that such heroic acts are basically brutish and violent. What the local people love is the story of Christy’s heroism, and he tells it over and over again until even Pegeen tires of it a little. Synge shows how absurd this supposedly heroic deed is by having Christy mime the actions of killing his father, using chicken bones to demonstrate.
The more the people tell Christy he is a hero, the more heroic he becomes. Widow Quin enters him in sporting competitions and he wins several prizes, much to the delight of the adoring crowd.
When Christy’s lie is found out, the locals turn on him. Pegeen scorns him and says he is ‘an ugly liar that was playing off the hero’. Christy is left with little choice but to kill his father in a fi ght in order to prove he really is a hero. Now the locals see what appears to be a real murder, and they are appalled. The whole notion of heroic slaying is revealed to be a fantasy. Christy, understandably, is bewildered when the local people are disgusted by his attack on his father and want him tied up, tortured and delivered to the police to be hanged. He appeals to Pegeen, believing that she will still love him now that he has carried out the ‘heroic’ deed for which she admired him so much. However, Pegeen refl ects the difference between heroic fantasy and harsh reality when she says that there is a great difference between a ‘gallous story and a dirty deed’.
In a peculiar twist, Christy becomes more heroic when the people turn on him than he was when they believed his story of the murder. He fi ghts those who tie him up and torture him, and he stands up to his father. The Mayo people’s admiration of him has given him the confi dence necessary to assert his independence and dominance. He tells his father that he will be master of the house from now on, and tells the locals that ‘you’ve turned me a likely gaffer in the end of all, the way I’ll go romancing through a romping lifetime from this hour to the dawning of the judgement day’.
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