The Wave | Liam O’Flaherty and the Speaking Voice
In the following excerpt, Murray faults O’Flaherty
for his didactic narrative, arguing that O’Flaherty
breaches the oral tradition by ‘‘refusing to let his
art suggest’’ important thematic issues, instead
weighing down his stories with ‘‘contrived symbolism
or overstated theme.’’
The success or failure of Liam O’Flaherty’s short fiction actually depends on quite a different phenomenon, one to which Vivian Mercier has made passing reference in a discussion of the stories of Corkery, Lavin, O’Connor, O’Faolain, and O’Flaherty. Although he is a native speaker of Gaelic and ‘‘therefore born into the oral tradition,’’ O’Flaherty is the ‘‘least oral in his approach to narrative of all five writers.’’ Mercier refers here to the conception of so many of the stories in what he calls ‘‘cinematic terms,’’ but the statement has other...
[The entire page is 729 words long]
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