Guess Who's Coming For The Dinner Roddy Doyle

Larry Linnane spends a majority of Roddy Doyle’s short story, “Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner?” showcasing his almost exclusive negative traits, these include his: Vulgarity, desperation, and racist –or at the very least, discriminatory tendencies. Easily his most expressed trait is his vulgarity which almost seems to manage to seep onto every page. Whether he is talking about sex with his wife, Mona, “Not bad for forty-five! Larry shouted once,” His obsession with farting, “Larry could fart all day – and he did,” Or his constant curses at his family, “And then, to Laurence: –Get up, yeh gobshite.” Larry Linnane was certainly a vulgar human being. However, this brashness was somewhat balanced by his sensitive desperation to keep his family close to him.

“If he kept saying No they’d all leave, all the girls.

It was what he would have expected of them.” When it came to defending himself, Larry Linnane was stubborn, but when it came to his family relations, he was compassionate –not unlike a walnut, hard on the outside but soft on the inside. His desperation to be loved by his family and to impress Ben at first (“Larry felt a sudden, roaring need to impress [Ben], a demand from his gut to be liked by him.”), give Larry a more compassionate side to sympathize with. Unfortunately, Larry’s final trait, his racist inclinations, is somewhat damning and makes him almost impossible to sympathize with. The Cambridge dictionary defines a racist as someone who, “believes that other races are not as good as their own and therefore treats them unfairly.” By this definition, when Larry says, “Phil Lynott was Irish! he said –He was from Crumlin. He was fuckin’ civilized!” he most definitely discriminates against non-Irish black people and therefore makes a racist

statement. On the other hand, Larry seems to differ, saying things such as: “He tortured himself for things to say, nice things that would prove he wasn’t a bigot.” And “There wasn’t a racist bone or muscle in his body,” While having these sentiments are nice, his actions further disprove them. “Why didn’t he want a refugee in the family? Well, there was AIDS for a start.” This line adds more fuel to the fire, confirming that Larry has predisposed notions towards black people. Specifically, when he first sees Ben, he remarks about Ben’s absence of scars and the stereotypes that Larry was used to seeing in television commercials like Live Aid. At the conclusion of the story, Larry takes the first steps into changing his mind and his racist thoughts, but cumulatively, Roddy Doyle’s, “Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner”, character mostly demonstrates his disagreeable traits via his strong vulgarity, desperation, and racist inclinations.