Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Character analysis where are you going
123 essays on character analysis
Into the wild character analysis
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Character analysis where are you going
At first glance, one would not imagine the Donnelly twins to play an important role in the play Translations by Brian Friel. However, after taking a closer look, it becomes apparent that this work would be much less meaningful if these characters were not presented. Although they never physically appear, their actions spark the conflict between the English and the Irish, as well as causing the main problem in the storyline to emerge.
The first time we hear of the Donnelly twins is when Manus asks Doalty and Bridget whether or not they will be coming to the hedge school for the lesson in the Act One. After Doalty clearly avoids answering the question, Bridget states, “Our Seamus says two of the soldiers’ horses were found last night at the foot of the cliffs at Machaire Buide and...” (page 15) and then she promptly stops as if she has said too much. Right from the beginning, Friel gives us the feeling that the twins are crafty and mysterious. We are able to infer that they pushed the horses of the cliff because of the context of the conversation.
What would cause them to do this? What inspires them to kill these men’s animals? In order to understand this, we must further understand the relationship between the English and the Irish. For 800 years, England occupied Ireland by oppressing their religious beliefs and destroying their culture by means of force. In the play, the soldiers are in Ballybeg to remap all of Ireland and standardize all of the Gaelic names into English. By doing this they effectively handicapped the Irish culture, angering many of them. The Donnelly twins harass the soldiers because they are not happy about them being in Ballybeg.
After the night of the dance, Yolland, an English lieutenant, mysteriously di...
... middle of paper ...
... The first is Doalty’s prank on the soldiers mapping. Second, the twins push the horses of the cliff. After that, they kill lieutenant Yolland. Finally, the English camp is set on fire, and the Irish plan to rebel. We can assume, because of their previous actions, that the Donnelly twins are responsible for the fire. Much like in real times of tension in a community, things continued to spiral out of control as neither culture gave in to the other.
The Donnelly twins are very important characters in Brian Friel’s Translations. They not only symbolize many kinds of people in Ireland, but they also move the story along and present us with the major conflict that occurs. The Donnelly twins embody all the actions that the Irish made in order to regain their freedom, and show us the major tensions that were occurring in Ireland during the time of this play’s performance.
Up to act one, Friel presents us with a tight knit and well-bonded community of people. People bonded by their nationality, culture and language. This of course is extremely ironic (Friel uses irony quite heavily in this play, for example the fact that Jimmy-Jack is called the "infant prodigy", he is in-fact in his late sixties. His name indicates that he has always been at the same precocious level of ability and he is unlikely to advance any further), the fact that the whole play is about the English renaming most of Ireland for conveniences sake. Also the English are teaching most of Ireland how to speak English, moving them away from their traditional Gaelic tongue. The English settlers are breaking up the community.
The first half of the play concerns a celebration - twins Girlie Delaney and Dibs Hamilton are celebrating their 80th birthdays, and with the gathering of their families comes the eruption of simmering resentments and anxieties about the future of Dibs and Farley Hamilton's farm, Allandale. The second half starts with a funeral and portrays the shattering of the tenuous links that held the family together.
Paddy’s Lament is about the terrible sufferings of the Irish people during the potato famine and of the cruel treatment that the Irish went through at the hands of the British people. The British did nothing to help the Irish survive when if they just shared their food they could have saved millions of people from a horrible death. They wrote in their newspapers that the Irish were lazy and didn’t want to work. At the time before the famine, the Irish loved their homeland and few wanted to immigrate to other countries. They had little money to buy a passage to America. They would send one member of the family to America and he would get a job to help those back home. As the famine got worse, the English were looking bad to the rest of the world and decided on a plan to ship all the Irish they could to America and Canada. This way they would rid themselves of the Irish problem. The British paid passage to families who would immigrate. The Irish were happy to leave, but the conditions on the British ships were deplorable. They had to stay on deck through the whole voyage, and about one in three people died. So many Irish people died that they became known as coffin ships. When they arrived in New York, the Irish were examined by a health examiner. Some families were separated from others, and children were separated from their mothers. The Irish were taken to tenements to live in. The conditions of the tenements were horrible. There were so many people living in them that the places we...
It was Sunday October 8th about 8:45pm, when Daniel “Peg Leg” Sullivan went to visit the O’Learys’ house only to find out they were asleep. So Sullivan walked across the street to Thomas White’s house and sat down to lean against the fence. The wind was very strong that night and there was a party at the McLaughlin’s to celebrate the arrival of a relative from Ireland. Sullivan decided to go home when he noticed a fire in the O’Learys’ barn. He started shouting, “FIRE!” as loud as he could and ran to the barn to save the five cows, horse, and calf inside. As he did, his peg leg got stuck in the floorboards. He hung onto the calf as they made their way out (13, 14,15).
...differences as an ending. Thousands have died regardless of the side they represented. As a reader, this eye witness account in the book brings to life the troubles in Northern Ireland. Walking the streets and living amongst the chaos shows the severity of the situation. This segregation still lives on today in Northern Ireland with no clear end in sight. But one can not expect a four hundred year long feud to end abruptly. Progress has been made in modern time but both sides need full dedication to end the divide. To put aside religion, politics and other blockades in order to truly find what is best for their nation. Just like the old Irish proverb, you've got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was. Forget what was in the past and by the elders so one can move on to a new united future whether it be united with Great Britain or Ireland.
There is particular consideration given to the political climate in this story. It is incorporated with social and ethnic concerns that are prevalent. The story also addresses prejudice and the theme of ethnic stereotyping through his character development. O'Connor does not present a work that is riddled with Irish slurs or ethnic approximations. Instead, he attempts to provide an account that is both informative and accurate.
...t happens and why the issues are ignored. I would present statistics of literary analyses that are relevant to feminist issues and draw a conclusion based on the data. Besides that, I would compare Onkey’s interpretation of the play with other critics’ interpretation and criticize them to strengthen Onkey’s point of view. In conclusion, Onkey’s disagreement about the lack of attention to women’s issues in most literary analyses especially of Brian Friel’s Translations is well grounded. Furthermore, I totally agree with her that Translations should not only be seen through the nationalistic point of view. Although it is obvious that British colonization of Ireland and cultural erosion inspire Friel to produce the play, the bigger theme in Translations appears to be the misinterpretation of woman as symbol of nation based on the magnitude and significance of the issue.
the plot of the story in the line “from forth the fatal loins of these two foes, a pair of
The conflict with in the short story is an internal conflict. The Irishmen are forced to forget about all humanity when dealing with the enemy during combat. This was extremely hard for the guards because all but Donovan had befriended the prisoners. It was stated that if any Irish prisoner was killed by the English, then Hawkins and Belcher would be executed. This was hard for both the guards and the prisoners because although they knew that Hawkins and Belcher would have nothing to do with executions elsewhere, they would be the target of punishment. As enemies, not by choice, the Irish must enforce this because they are on the lower chain of command. So in a way they are absolved from their feelings of guilt because they "have a duty to do so."
In the novel's opening story, "The Sisters," Joyce elevates this concern with writing "reality" from sub-theme to theme: the story is an extended meditation on textuality just as much as it is the story of a boy and a priest. By beginning with a metatext Joyce brilliantly opens up the entire collection for a different kind of reading, one based on noticing rather than overlooking literature's limitations. With...
In Heaney's book of poetry entitled Opened Ground, Heaney shows the readers many different ways in which English rule and influence effected and changed the lives of different people in Ireland. For example, in Two Lorries, Heaney describes a man who is a coal deliverer and his love for Heaney's mother. As the poem progresses, we can see a metamorphosis in the lorry. As the political situation in Ireland escalates and war between different religious factions grows more immanent, the lorry changes from a man who falls in love with Heaney's mother to a raving political and religious war type man who needs to become involved in the skirmish between the religious groups and by doing this eventually blows...
A collection of short stories published in 1907, Dubliners, by James Joyce, revolves around the everyday lives of ordinary citizens in Dublin, Ireland (Freidrich 166). According to Joyce himself, his intention was to "write a chapter of the moral history of [his] country and [he] chose Dublin for the scene because the city seemed to [b]e the centre of paralysis" (Friedrich 166). True to his goal, each of the fifteen stories are tales of disappointment, darkness, captivity, frustration, and flaw. The book is divided into four sections: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life (Levin 159). The structure of the book shows that gradually, citizens become trapped in Dublin society (Stone 140). The stories portray Joyce's feeling that Dublin is the epitome of paralysis and all of the citizens are victims (Levin 159). Although each story from Dubliners is a unique and separate depiction, they all have similarities with each other. In addition, because the first three stories -- The Sisters, An Encounter, and Araby parallel each other in many ways, they can be seen as a set in and of themselves. The purpose of this essay is to explore one particular similarity in order to prove that the childhood stories can be seen as specific section of Dubliners. By examining the characters of Father Flynn in The Sisters, Father Butler in An Encounter, and Mangan's sister in Araby, I will demonstrate that the idea of being held captive by religion is felt by the protagonist of each story. In this paper, I argue that because religion played such a significant role in the lives of the middle class, it was something that many citizens felt was suffocating and from which it was impossible to get away. Each of the three childhood stories uses religion to keep the protagonist captive. In The Sisters, Father Flynn plays an important role in making the narrator feel like a prisoner. Mr. Cotter's comment that "… a young lad [should] run about and play with young lads of his own age…" suggests that the narrator has spent a great deal of time with the priest. Even in death, the boy can not free himself from the presence of Father Flynn (Stone 169) as is illustrated in the following passage: "But the grey face still followed me. It murmured; and I understood that it desired to confess something.
If anyone ever asked you to describe the relationship between Ireland and England, what would be the first words to come into your mind? Rough? Yes, absolutely. Deaths? Too many! Unforgivable actions? That affected innocent people, yes. The road to Ireland’s independence was long and rough, and many people, both Irish and English, suffered losses that were not replaceable. In the movie In the Name of the Father (1993), directed by Jim Sheridan and produced by the already mentioned as well as Gabriel Byrne, Terry George and Arthur Lappin, we follow Gerry Conlon, an Irishman from Belfast who is sent to London by his father. Gerry happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and is falsely accused of the bombing of two pubs in the Guildford area, spoken about as an act of terrorism. These bombings happened during the height of The Troubles.
In the beginning of the novel, the boys are brought together by the sound of the conch. When they were all together the choose there chief Ralph, and establish rule that they could abide by so that they have a chance to survive and also to get off the island. As the novel continues the boys are working together and everything is fine, but one a littluen brings up the point of their being
In James Joyce’s Dubliners, the theme of escape tends to be a trend when characters are faced with critical decisions. Joyce’s novel presents a bleak and dark view of Ireland; his intentions by writing this novel are to illustrate people’s reasons to flee Ireland. In the stories “Eveline, “Counterparts”, and the “Dead”, characters are faced with autonomous decisions that shape their lives. This forlorn world casts a gloomy shadow over the characters of these stories. These stories are connected by their similar portrayal of Ireland. They clearly represent Joyce’s views on people’s discontent with Ireland.