Written as the first-person narration of a Dublin student who relishes multiple approaches to the representation of reality, this antirealistic novel presents a narrator living with an insufferably conventional uncle. The young man has reason to resent his uncle’s inquisitiveness: he is an indifferent student, spending as much of his time as possible writing a very unusual book or enjoying a pint with friends.

In the narrator’s book, the protagonist, Dermot Trellis, is himself writing a book. The narrator shares passages with his best friend, and at these junctions the story switches to the novel-within-a-novel. In this inner novel, Trellis is writing a condemnation of Ireland’s moral decay (the inner inner novel). Its villain is John Furriskey, but many of the characters are borrowed, or “hired,” from preexisting works and genres. (See also intertextuality.) Whenever Trellis falls asleep, his characters break free of his control. Finn McCool, a mythic Irish hero, tells a long story about mad Sweeny, condemned to flit about Ireland praising its various locations, one of which is Swim-Two-Birds. The characters so much enjoy the autonomy they gain when Trellis is sleeping that they plot to eliminate him and set themselves free.

In his waking moments, however, Trellis fathers a son with a character, the virtuous Sheila Lamont. This boy, Orlick, falls under the tutelage of the Pooka Fergus McPhellimey, a demon who wins him in a card game with the Good Fairy. Orlick is also a writer, and the characters soon persuade him to write a story that will imprison, torment, and execute his father. In a grand courtroom scene, characters from each of the plot layers present arguments, but Trellis escapes death when his manuscript burns. The story returns to the unnamed young student who has written the writing of the writing (all of which is written by Flann O’Brien); when he passes his university exams, he also decides he can get along with his uncle.

At Swim-Two-Birds is a showcase of literary styles: when mythological Irish figures are speaking, the narration imitates (and perhaps parodies) the sentence patterns, metaphors, and literary devices of myth and folklore, including the highly romantic translations of ancient Celtic literature that had been popular adjuncts to nationalism earlier in the century; and, when figures out of westerns are speaking, they switch to the style of American “dime novels” of the late 19th century—with an Irish lilt. The novel owes much to James Joyce, who praised it. It is an extremely complex structure that comments on narrative as a form of literary convention, but it never abandons the author’s interest in writing a fierce satire on the hollowness of modern Irish life. It is aware of itself as a work of art, taking advantage of ambiguity in the story, characters, and multiple plots.

At the center of the novel, however, is mad Sweeney singing the praises of every part of Ireland. For all its satire, At Swim-Two-Birds is also a statement of national pride.

Bibliography
Imhof, Rudiger. Alive Alive-O!: Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. Dublin: Wolfhound Press; Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1985.
Shea, Thomas F. Flann O’Brien’s Exorbitant Novels. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1992.

Categories: British Literature, Irish Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: ambiguous narration, Analysis of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, antirealism in literature, At Swim-Two-Birds, Dermot Trellis, experimental novel, Finn McCool, Flann O'Brien, Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, intertextuality, Irish Literature, Irish nationalism in literature, James Joyce influence, literary parody, literary styles parody, mad Sweeney, Metafiction, metafictional structure, modernist Irish fiction, myth and folklore in fiction, narrative complexity, narrative layers in fiction, novel-within-a-novel, Orlick character, Pooka Fergus McPhellimey, postmodern fiction, satire of Irish life, self-referential fiction, Sheila Lamont character, student narrator, Swim-Two-Birds setting, twentieth-century Irish novel