black rock. The descriptions are carefully controlled with the detachment of a scientific observation: ‘‘The cliff was two hundred feet high. It sloped outwards from its grassy summit, along ten feet of brown gravel, down one hundred and seventy feet of grey limestone, giant slabs piled horizontally with large slits between the slabs where sea-birds nested.’’ It is almost as if O’Flaherty is cataloguing the scene before him.

In addition, O’Flaherty’s images are concrete. That is, the images in the story appeal to each of the reader’s senses directly, without a narrative intermediary. The most obvious images are, of course, visual ones: ‘‘Its base in front was ragged, uneven and scratched with white foam.’’ There are also many examples of auditory images that engage the A rocky Irish coastline, similar to the one described in ‘‘The Wave.’’ reader’s sense of hearing: ‘‘a tumbling mass of white water that yawned and hissed and roared.’’ Less obvious are those images appealing to the sense of touch, such as ‘‘ice-smooth breast,’’ or ‘‘slimy weeds.’’ Even taste is addressed indirectly: the cliff’s face is ‘‘drenched with brine.’’ Finally, the story abounds with kinesthetic images, or images of movement: ‘‘the wave stood motionless,’’ ‘‘the wave sprang upwards,’’ ‘‘they drivelled backwards slowly.’’

The most important technique O’Flaherty uses to establish the tone of detachment, however, is his narrator. Zneimer, in fact, argues that there is no narrator, nor any sense of O’Flaherty’s presence: ‘‘We do not hear the author’s voice. We see no evidence of his presence, only the scene, the wondrous vision, not told but imposed directly upon us.’’

Such a reading, however, denies the obvious. All stories have tellers, just as all texts have writers. Even encyclopedia articles are authored by someone, despite their detached, authoritative style. It is through the process of inclusion and exclusion of facts and details that all authors provide the narration to their texts. In the case of ‘‘The Wave,’’ O’Flaherty attempts to hide his presence in the text through the use of what is called the ‘‘self-effacing’’ narrator. That is, he chooses to conceal his narrator by the seeming objectivity of the description. However, close reading of the images reveals that the story is, of course, not nature itself, but a humanly constructed text about nature, a text that is shaped in a particular way to reveal a particular understanding of reality.

Thus, although there are no living characters in the story, O’Flaherty bridges the gap between the mineral, elemental nature of the cliff and the sea and the organic nature of animal and human by using similes and metaphors. By so doing, he animates both the wave and the cliff. The cliff, for example, is nearly always described in human terms. The cliff has a black face, and a ‘‘great black mouth,’’ that it tries to close. The cliff yawns, ‘‘tired of battle.’’

Likewise, O’Flaherty uses primarily animal or monster images to describe the waves: the wave’s head ‘‘curved outwards, arched like the neck of an angry swan. . . . I ts crest broke and points of water stuck out, curving downwards like fangs. It seemed to bend its head as it hurtled forward to ram the cliff.’’ Similarly, ‘‘The waves came towering into the cove across both reefs, confusedly, meeting midway in the cove, chasing one another, climbing over one another’s backs, spitting savage columns of green and white water vertically, when their arched manes clashed.’’

In addition to animating the inanimate seascape, the images serve to connect ‘‘The Wave’’ with the other stories in the collection, stories about peasant life and animal life on the Aran Islands. Each of the stories, in some way, refers to the cycles of life and death on Aran. Indeed, calling a collection Spring Sowing implies a belief in the cyclic renewal of plants, animals and humans. The spring sowing and the fall harvest organize life and reality on Aran, and by extension, in the universe.

However, the inclusion of ‘‘The Wave’’ in Spring Sowing introduces a more disturbing view of reality, one that undercuts the cycle implicit in the title of the collection. The cycle represented by ‘‘The Wave’’ is not one of renewal, but one of destruction. The opening images of the story place the waves and the cliff in opposition to each other: ‘‘The sea had eaten up the part of the cliff that rested on that semicircle of flat rock, during thousands of years of battle.’’ If Aran is indeed a microcosm of the earth and of the universe for O’Flaherty, the elemental struggle between wave and cliff becomes laden with significance. The struggle implies that the sea, like time, never ceases moving, and that all within its path will, inevitably, be destroyed. Even the solid earth, made of rock and metal, will crumble and disappear within the sea of time.

It should not be thought, however, that O’Flaherty represents the sea or the waves as evil forces. Rather, it seems that O’Flaherty views such forces as coldly neutral, all powerful, and inevitable. In his novel, The Black Soul, O’Flaherty’s main character, Fergus O’Connor, cries ‘‘Ah, beautiful, fierce sea. . . . You are immortal. You have real life, unchanging life.’’ It seems that the position of ‘‘The Wave’’ within Spring Sowing reinforces the contrast between the mutable, changing, mortal nature of human beings and the immutable, unchanging, immortal nature of the sea. Human life, after all, is lived within finite time, while time itself exists separate and apart from the timed. Thus, while the residents of Aran (and by extension, the earth) go about their daily business, caring for animals, sowing seed, giving birth, burying their dead, they do so within a temporary and provisional reality. As ‘‘The Wave’’ instructs, even the reality of the cliff face is temporary and ultimately impermanent against the unchanging, all-powerful reality of the sea.

In the last paragraphs of the story, a monstrous wave forms and hurls itself against the cliff with devastating strength. The cliff, made human by its face, is utterly destroyed by the wave. In this final cataclysm, all the cycles of human life and death are rendered meaningless. Like a human, the cliff disappears into black dust. Although the wave itself disappears as well, the last line of the story reveals that in the cove, the ocean gathers another wave.

Source: Diane Andrews Henningfeld, ‘‘An Overview of ‘The Wave’,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 1999.

Short story writer and novelist Liam O’Flaherty was born on the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland, and this geographic fact may be the most significant factor in his writing, for his work reflects the wildness and instability of life on these isolated, storm-battered islands. Although O’Flaherty first began to work seriously on his writing in the years following World War I, while in the United States and London, he acknowledged in an autobiographical note that these efforts were not very good, and he burnt them. His work took an abrupt turn after 1923, however, when he returned to his homeland, Inishmore on Aran. The 1920s saw his enormous literary output; in that decade alone he wrote 8 of his 15 novels as well as the majority of his 160 short stories. Seemingly inspired by Aran, O’Flaherty also spoke of his desire to be the voice for his people: ‘‘It seemed as if the dam had burst somewhere in my soul; for the words poured forth in a torrent. They came joyously and I felt exalted by their utterance, just as I used to feel when telling my mother some fantastic tale in my infancy.’’

Many of O’Flaherty’s short stories concern the peasant life of Ireland and can function today as a sort of social history. A number of his stories, however, are nature stories, with animals usually taking the center stage. Richard J. Thompson has said, ‘‘At their most obvious, O’Flaherty’s nature stories are celebrations of the workings of instinct and appetite, of the biological chain, and of the struggle of natural selection which often brings random death to living creatures but never dishonor.’’ O’Flaherty’s ‘‘The Wave,’’ from the collection Spring Sowing, goes one step further and features no living characters. The brief story (only about 1,000 words) narrates waves crashing against a towering cliff. After several fierce lashings, a powerful wave gathers, pummeling the shoreline. Under such pounding, the cliff gives way, crumbling into the sea, leaving behind only a cloud of grey dust. In the cove, the waves continue to gather. Critics have disagreed over interpretations of this story. Is it indeed a story or merely a vignette? Should it function primarily as a descriptive piece or does it express some deeper connection between humans and nature? Does O’Flaherty admire the destructive actions of the waves or does he represent an impartial viewer?

Most critics do agree that ‘‘The Wave’’ takes its place among the larger body of O’Flaherty’s work that depicts the balance of nature. Helene O’Connor points out that the upsetting of the accepted equilibrium and the establishment of a new one ‘‘is the repeated and distinctive pattern of O’Flaherty’s stories.’’ However, at the start of the story, it would appear that O’Flaherty has created a simple (and perhaps typical) descriptive yarn. It begins, ‘‘The cliff was two hundred feet height. It sloped outwards from its grassy summit, along ten feet of brown gravel, down one hundred and seventy feet of grey limestone, giant slabs piled horizontally with large slits between the slabs where seabirds nested.’’ The next few paragraphs continue in the same vein, describing the cavern in the cliff’s face, the cove at its base, and the constant pounding of the waves. Not until the third paragraph does O’Flaherty provide a hint of the drama and of the central storyline to come: ‘‘But the sea moved so violently that the two reefs bared with each receding wave until they seemed to be long shafts of black steel sunk into the bowels of the ocean.’’ Amidst a background of benign and nature-derived adjectives, the word violent leaps out, drawing attention to itself and to the turn the story is about to take.

The reader soon understands how ‘‘The Wave’’ functions on two levels. With no real characters in the story, the smaller waves and the giant wave take on central roles, emerging as inexorable forces of nature, but they also have distinct predatory characteristics. The waves that precede the final lash from the ocean move ‘‘confusedly, meeting halfway in the cove, chasing one another, climbing over one another’s backs.’’ The waves have transformed from merely a part of the scenery into living creatures.

The hostility of these waves, akin to that of a lion perhaps, is clear not only from their actions but from their desire to bring harm; they strike the cliff with ‘‘a mighty roar’’ and then they rise again ‘‘like the heavy breathing of a gluttonous giant.’’ Yet O’Flaherty never sacrifices realism in his drive to bring to life the movements of the water. Instead, his writing takes on a dual nature. Every description of the waves works with either interpretation; for instance, the ‘‘mighty roar’’ as the waves strike the cliff evokes both the known sounds, or roars, of the sea, as well as the sound of an animal on the attack. O’Flaherty also effectively mixes images that remind the reader of both of these descriptive functions, such as the ‘‘manes of red seaweed.’’ Here the reader finds an effortless invocation of both the sea and the animal.

The large, destructive wave is yet to come. Again, O’Flaherty clues the reader into the impending change with the words ‘‘there was a pause.’’ These words also imply culpability, as if the wave itself is toying with the cliff while gathering strength for its final assault. ‘‘For a moment the wave stood motionless,’’ writes O’Flaherty. Here the wave is taking the time to savor the attack. The prose that follows, although containing descriptions of animal- like features—the ‘‘neck of an angry swan,’’ an ‘‘ice-smooth breast,’’ or ‘‘the shoulders of the sea’’—also describes the sea in more realistic terms— the ‘‘white foam’’ or the ‘‘belt of dark blue.’’ The sea at this point is more water and less animal. Suddenly, O’Flaherty overturns that lulling sensibility. ‘‘Then there was a roar. The wave sprang upwards to its full height. Its crest broke and points of water struck out, curving downwards like fangs. It seemed to bend its head as it hurtled forward to ram the cliff.’’ When the cliff, ‘‘tired of battle,’’ gives up and falls into the sea, the overall effect is that the wave attacked the cliff purposefully, deliberately, and maliciously. O’Flaherty also acknowledges the relentless nature of the sea itself in the story’s final words: ‘‘And the wave had disappeared. Already another one was gathering in the cove.’’

This brief narrative tells of a cataclysmic event— the extreme alteration of the natural environment. Yet, its effect on humans or even animals would seem negligible, for they do not exist in the scope of the story. The extreme isolation of the scene is apparent in the structure O’Flaherty has chosen to impose on it; no lizards scuttle along the cliff’s grassy summit, no fish flop among the crashing waves, no birds observe the crumbling of the cliff or flap their wings in the cloud of grey dust that arises. But the implications of the scene are apparent, too. Early in the story, O’Flaherty points out that the sea and the cliff had been engaged in ‘‘thousands of years of battle.’’ For in the victory of the sea over the cliff, the equilibrium so long maintained by the earth has been destroyed, implying that all sorts of changes can come about at any time. As O’Connor points out, ‘‘Everything is quiet, but not as it was before.’’

That there is no logical purpose for the motion of the sea or the destruction of the cliff also serves to emphasize the isolation of this event. But O’Flaherty brings a human element into the story with his depiction of the cliff. He maintains narrative integrity by again using words that can both describe an aspect of nature and a living creature; to refer to a ‘‘cliff’s face’’ or a ‘‘cavern’s mouth’’ is to say nothing new, but O’Flaherty’s cliff also ‘‘stood ajar, as if it yawned, tired of battle,’’ and under attack from the wave, the ‘‘cliff tried to close the mouth.’’ While the waves can only be compared to animals, the cliff can readily be compared to a human. This significance cannot be overlooked, nor can its implications for the ongoing battle between nature and humans. At the same time, however, O’Flaherty is careful not to create a clear dichotomy between the cliff and the waves; his implementation of the same technique indicates their similarities.

Stories such as ‘‘The Wave’’ confirm Amy Scher’s assertion that O’Flaherty’s ‘‘short stories prove him to be one of the first of twentieth-century writers to demonstrate an ecological sensitivity.’’ O’Flaherty, while pointing to the battle between earth and earth and humans and earth, also points to how animals and humans are equally embodiments of life and nature. In the emphasis ‘‘The Wave’’ places on nature over human or animal characters, O’Flaherty indicates that nature is a crucial force in the cycle of life.

In a letter to a friend, O’Flaherty tells of his efforts to achieve in his writing ‘‘a feeling for coldness.’’ Critic John Zneimer defines this as ‘‘the coldness of extreme detachment, pure artistry, where the artist’s warm human qualities represent a blot or an imperfection if they are allowed to intrude.’’ He further states, ‘‘O’Flaherty sees the writer as possessing a goat’s eye, or a snake’s eye, or a weasel’s eye, as one who is condemned to observe but not participate in the richness of life.’’ This objectivity on O’Flaherty’s part enables him to raise many issues in a story as short as ‘‘The Wave’’: the emphasis on nature without human interference, the implication of the continuous battles that exist around nature, and the fundamental similarities of the creatures of earth—human, animal, and inanimate.

Source: Rena Korb, ‘‘Nature as a Living Thing’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 1999. Korb has a master’s degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers.

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 far-reaching implications. By extension he faults O’Flaherty for failing to remember that the relationship between story teller and audience is the indispensable component of the oral tradition. Liam O’Flaherty’s style does not falter only when he leaves the barnyard; his imagery, his dialogue—in fact, the entire fabric of his narrative—disintegrates completely whenever he abandons his primary function as story teller in favor of self-conscious commentary on life; when, refusing to let his art suggest, he must speak through literature, only to pull down his tale under the weight of contrived symbolism or overstated theme.

Disparities in O’Flaherty’s prose style bear out this argument. Whenever he rejects the straight narrative told for its own sake for the short story of philosophical statement, artless grace gives way to inappropriate imagery, careless structure, and tedious repetition. Selections from the first collection, Spring Sowing, will serve to illustrate this consistent stylistic problem in O’Flaherty’s short fiction.

In choosing Liam O’Flaherty’s finest stories, Mercier singled out the title piece of his first group for special praise. Here the writer deals with the central theme of nature and man’s relations with the natural environment, but most important, according to Professor Mercier, is that ‘‘[t]his picture of a newly married Aran Islands couple sowing their first crop of potatoes together is both realistic and symbolic.’’ This observation is entirely correct. The seeds in Mary’s apron, Martin’s cheeks on fire with a ‘‘primeval desire . . . to assert manhood and subjugate earth,’’ his wife’s deep sigh as he cleaves the ground to the accompaniment of his stooped grandfather’s encouraging shrieks—all are symbolic of man’s renewal in and through the regenerative earth mother. And, in this first story in Liam O’Flaherty’s first collection of stories, the reader discovers in microcosm both the essence of his narrative strength and his potential for failure. The symbolism comes dangerously close to shouting the writer’s theme, and both threaten to overwhelm the narrative straining to support them. The oral qualities of this story prove to be its salvation; but when the configuration of a symbolic structure or the statement of a theme becomes more important than the narrative in which it should inhere, O’Flaherty’s style breaks down, consistently, and often horribly.

There are for example several stories in this first series in which, naturally enough for an Aran Islander, Liam O’Flaherty has chosen to deal with the sea. ‘‘The Wave,’’ a vignette without characters, would perhaps have been successful as purely descriptive prose. Yet O’Flaherty attempts to force from the landscape a symbolic evocation of mindless violence. The stress is painfully obvious; the story disintegrates into a series of grotesque images of which one contorted smile is sufficient example: ‘‘the trough of the sea was convulsing like water in a shaken glass.’’ ‘‘The Landing’’ promises at first to be more successful. Thematically reminiscent of Synge’s starkly beautiful ‘‘Riders to the Sea,’’ the tale projects a powerful image of barren Ireland in the grieving Aran mother watching on the cliff, ‘‘wisps of grey hair flying about her face.’’ Unfortunately O’Flaherty cannot permit the narrative to suggest its own multi-level meaning to his audience. Over and over he circles his theme, more and more explicitly stating the paradox of sea as simultaneous nourisher and destroyer. Finally, inevitably, he loses control and tells his reader that the raging ocean resembles ‘‘eau de cologne or something.’’ Faulty parallelism and repetition mar this potentially fine story at its close.

Source: Michael H. Murray, ‘‘Liam O’Flaherty and the Speaking Voice,’’ in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. V, No. 2, Winter, 1968, pp. 154-62.