The violence and idealism of the events of 1916 to 1923 created in Ireland a mood of national hysteria. At least that was the voice heard by O'Connor trying to capture those events in prose six years after. In fact, the two extremes between which Guests of the Nation vacillates are hysteria and melancholy, between thoughtless act and numbed thoughtfulness. Benedict Kiely detected in these stories a "genuine bliss-was-it-in-that-dawn-to-be-alive romanticism," an adolescent enjoyment of the guns, the ambushes, the flying-columns. Indeed, this hysterical romanticism swirls across the surface of all but the last four stories.

"Jumbo's Wife," "Alec," and "Machine-Gun Corps in Action" are examples of the romanticized violence of the sort O'Connor found in Isaac Babel. In these stories war exposes the folly and weakness of character as well the normal responses of people under pressure. Situation dominates character and the voice is blurred. The stories fail, not because O'Connor idealized violence, but because he failed to control its comic energy. (p. 76)

As surely as violence and hysteria, along with their safety valve of comic hilarity, dominate the surface of Guests of the Nation, a more serious and thoughtful voice operates below that surface, a voice of compassion and bitterness. After all, war is not a normal situation, at least not for amateur warriors. The humor of "Laughter" and "Machine-Gun Corps in Action" is the comedy of disorder, of natural nervous tension in the face of violent death. O'Connor distrusted the cold, organizational mind of the professional soldier, for whom fear and disorder have been disciplined away. If romantic hysteria, nervous laughter, and chaotic fear represent natural responses of plain people to the stress of war, then disillusionment, accompanied by loneliness and melancholy, emerges just as naturally from the violence and stress. After "hysteria" the other word used throughout the volume more than might be normally expected is "melancholy." (p. 79)

"September Dawn" is the centerpiece of Guests of the Nation in the same way "Fugue" is the centerpiece of Sean O'Faolain's volume of stories, Midsummer Night Madness. Neither is the finest story of its volume but each is the emotional core and both are about the same set of events…. [Both] stories end with a vague kind of hope in a rising morning.

"September Dawn" is the centerpiece of Guests of the Nation not for its theme but its voice. The lyricism of O'Connor's adolescent poems has by now been distilled into the poetic realism of a man looking back on the time of his passage to maturity. The romance of war with its tragic violence and comic disarray has been diverted to a melancholy acceptance of love and friendship. The hysteria of death has become the melancholy of life. (p. 80)

As in most of the stories in Guests of the Nation the setting appears as natural and unobtrusive. From the flat, densely populated area around Mallow the two boys flee the encircling ring of enemy troops, almost like animals, instinctively toward the safety of the wilds. But place is never the primary dimension in an O'Connor story. Some of the stories in the volume take place in or near Cork City with its wet streets, quays, steep hills, pubs, churches, lanes, and shops. Most of the actual fighting stories are set in the countryside outside Cork, in the rugged mountains around Macroom or the gentle hills around Mallow. Setting for O'Connor emerges as a complement to the voice of the story; setting is atmosphere. Most of the stories are wrapped in darkness, casting the disarray and desolation in silhouetted relief. Even time is vague, for the historical moment dominates natural time. (pp. 81-2)

As the emotional center of the volume "September Dawn" mediates the numbed thoughtfulness of the first and last stories with the thoughtless frenzy of the intervening stories. Its betweenness is the emotional condition of passage, and in the poignant layering of national transition and personal growth lies the lonely voice. The volume begins in war and ends in a temporal vacuum resembling peace. (p. 83)

The final story of the volume returns to the crisis of adolescence. "The Procession of Life" ties together much of the volume, both in tone and theme. The voice is a male voice looking back on the confusion and anxiety of growing up…. It is another "playboy of the western world" perhaps; generation after generation echoing the same lonely voice, adolescence, maturity, and old age improvising solace in the face of cold separation.

Seeking to capture in his own volume of stories something of the unity of Turgenev, Moore, and Joyce, O'Connor gave special force to the stories that open and close Guests of the Nation. The lonely voice of "The Procession of Life" circles the entire volume, signaling the passage from hysterical romance to melancholy realism. It stands somewhat apart from the rest of the volume in terms of treatment, yet complements the overall ambiance. Curiously, it represents the kind of story for which O'Connor later became famous, the Larry Delaney story of childhood and adolescence. The voice is lyrical but not altogether personal; although there are distinct autobiographical overtones, O'Connor's natural reserve discourages too facile identification. Loneliness is embodied rather than indulged, and in the detached, backward look characteristic of nearly every story in the volume, the voices generate a life of their own.

Likewise, the title story that opens the volume stands apart. There is nothing else quite like it in O'Connor's work; its brilliance and integrity are beyond question. In "Guests of the Nation" O'Connor backs away from chauvinism and hysteria far enough to allow a glimpse of the characters' tragic impotence, but not so far as to miss their emotional vibrations. Thrown together by the vagaries of war, three Irish rebels and their two English hostages come to personal terms over cards and share a momentary truce in conversation. But national priorities take precedence over individual loyalties; abstract retribution undermines concrete friendship. After "assassinating" the two helpless hostages the hero-narrator finds himself in a melancholy vacuum: "It is so strange what you feel at such moments, and not to be written afterwards…. I was somehow very small and very lonely. And anything that ever happened to me after I never felt the same about again."…

O'Connor has not indicted the rebels nor their cause; neither has he vindicated violence. Rather he has isolated its horrible effects at the moment of impact. For him human dignity and rationality inevitably yield to the sudden impulse, to the unpredictable and passing moment. So although there is nothing quite like it in the rest of O'Connor's writing, "Guests of the Nation" contains these qualities which are unmistakably O'Connor's—it is simple, it possesses tight narrative design and lively drama, and it carries sparse revelations in language direct and alive. Most of all, the story embodies that "lyric cry in the face of destiny." (pp. 84-6)

No matter where O'Connor got his story and no matter how obliquely he grafted it onto different characters and situations, "Guests of the Nation" emerged in the telling as a tightly designed and provocative story. It has become a classic story, honored by many imitations including Brendan Behan's "The Hostage." In "Guests of the Nation" as in few of his other earlier stories, O'Connor rises above mere contrivance and literary fumbling to voice the sort of primary affirmation which he himself insisted was vital to great literature. (p. 87)

The Saint and Mary Kate was Frank O'Connor's religious love book, a testament to the magic of love and the exuberance of faith. The treatment was entirely from without because the drama was all too within that passionate variety show in his own mind….

If The Saint and Mary Kate is the work of a young man groping for a suitable theme, it is also the work of an Irishman writing to locate a cohesive Irish consciousness. On one hand, then, the novel is a private quest and an act of love. As such it reveals something of the character of the man who wrote it. On the other hand, this novel is a public portrait and an act of defiance. To understand it is to catch a glimpse of the nature of his circumstances. For O'Connor to do battle with the provincial narrowness of Cork was to encounter his own provincialism…. (p. 103)

As compelling and sensitive as it is in parts, The Saint and Mary Kate is not a successful novel. For one thing O'Connor took an abstraction too seriously and let it dictate his plot. For a novelist, even one given to thematic concerns, such an approach often signals a weakness; for a storyteller like O'Connor it is disastrous. The particular abstraction here is the opposition between two conflicting ways of life, represented by Mary Kate and Phil. (p. 108)

The dislocation of these two youngsters in time and space stems from the tragic gap between dreams and realities, between emotions and thoughts. A profound theme, to be sure, and one that O'Connor would elucidate in more subtle ways in later stories, but profound or not, a theme imposed on situation and character calls attention to itself instead of emerging naturally from the whole….

O'Connor's inclinations as a storyteller get in the way of his novel. He is too easily diverted from his deterministic "tragedy of innocence." By his own critical standards, a novel requires a society, not just a vague backdrop. O'Connor appears so intrigued by the people that he barely elaborates on the world in which they live, the world that supposedly crushes their dreams. Still, the setting of the novel is drawn with such swift sympathy that it strikes the reader as absolutely genuine, a tribute Sean O'Faolain believed, "the only real tribute" Cork's poor ever received. It is precisely his sympathy that diverts O'Connor's attention. When he sketches a tenement feud, or the face of one of Cork's "characters," or the tone of an overheard conversation, he appears diverted by the potential story; a passing glance should be part of a carefully sustained progress rather than a frozen moment.

All in all, then, the part dominates the whole in The Saint and Mary Kate, and the part that dominates most exquisitely is character. The strength of this novel is its characters. (p. 109)

Inevitably … The Saint and Mary Kate stands not on its own merit as a novel but on what it reveals about the personal and artistic concerns of Frank O'Connor at the beginning of his career. He was a lyric poet who felt ill at ease behind the mannered mask of verse. He was a storyteller interested more in the flash points of human existence than in the sweeping artifice. And he was a lonely young writer trying to find himself. (p. 111)