Frank O'Connor
Frank O'Conner was born on September 17, 1903, in the slums of Cork, Ireland, and died on March 10, 1966 in Dublin, Ireland. Though his formal education never went past grade school, he wrote more than two hundred short stories, many of them published first in The New Yorker, as well as two novels, several plays, poetry, translations, literary and cultural criticism, and two volumes of an autobiography. He taught and lectured at Harvard among other universities and colleges, and received an honorary doctorate from Trinity College.
O'Conner was the only son of Michael (Mick) O'Donovan, a former British soldier and alcoholic, Minnie O'Connor, an orphan from a young age. Raised in poverty, his mother was forced to work as a charwoman in order to supplement the family income. According to Hilary Lennon, O'Connor was a lonely, timid and frail child who was sick from school often. He was afraid of his father, who re-enlisted in the British army during World War I, and hence was absent for a number of years during his childhood.
O'Connor's formal schooling ended in 1916 but he was by this time educating himself. An enthusiastic and committed reader, he frequently borrowed from Cork public library. After leaving school, O'Connor spent the next few years in a series of jobs but none of them lasted very long. He had already begun to write short pieces and the political and cultural scene of the time had a profound effect on him.
The country was undergoing its protracted and bloody transition from a colonial state to a constitutional, independent modern nation. The 1916 Easter Uprising lead O'Connor to become interested in Irish nationalism. Eventually he enlisted as a volunteer in the War of Independence; however his young age precluded him from seeing much military action. In February 1923 O'Connor was captured by Free State soldiers and held in Gormanstown Internment Camp just outside Dublin until his release in December of that year.
Though O'Connor never went to university he later considered this period in his life as rich an education as anything a college could have offered him. By the time he left prison, O'Connor came to view the Catholic Church and the Free State government as adversely dominating forces at work in Irish society. The war experiences delineated the beginning of O'Connor's passage from a romantic adolescent to a more independent realistic adult. He became disillusioned with, and frequently and bitterly fought against, Free State government and church policies, yet he retained a deep love for the country, its people, its culture and traditions. O'Connor's civil war experiences led to a lifelong struggle with the role of the state and moreover, the role of Catholicism in Irish life, and the conflicting relationship with the country and the people. This tension of contraries became central to many of his writings.
Although O'Connor delved into many literary endeavors, this paper will look at three short stories from different periods of the O'Connor's career and his depiction of God and religion.
Guest of a Nation
O'Conner fills his stories with irony and freely shows his disdain for the hypocrisy of church and state. The short story a Guest of a Nation was published in 1931, not long after the writer's participation...
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