Essay on Brendan Behan

Essay on Br abolishan BehanThis essay looks at three of Brendan Behans of import races which near critics allot atomic number 18 his best. These three main works be The Quare consort (1954), The warrantor (1958) and Borstal Boy (1958).The essay begins with a instruct biography of Behans life and r eveals around of the reasons how his younger yrs influenced his posterior works. The essay withal gives a brief synopsis of these three works and explores approximately of the re-occurring themes within these works. It finally examines some of the personal manners that he has shaped and influenced the Irish national individuality.Brendan Behan was born in capital of Ireland on 9 February 1923 into an educated Dublin working level family. He grew up in Dublins north inner city surface Mountjoy Square. Both his parents had a big influence on the literature that he would juveniler come to write. Behans dumb nominate, Stephen, had been active in the Irish War of license his mother Kathleen remained politically active for all life and his uncle Peadar Kearney composed the Irish national anthem The Soldiers Song(Amhrn na bhFiann). When Brendan was a child his father would often read orderic literature to the children at bedtime and his mother would walk appear them on walks around the city pointing out different houses of noted Irish literary figures, while also showing them where the citys revolutionaries had been born or executed. When Brendan was a child he would read anything he could find and even at the mature of six the head nun in his primary instruct had informed his mother Kathleen that she was rearing a genius (O Connor, 1970 p.20). Despite his intelligible ability at school he decided at the age of 14 to leave and follow his fathers trade as a painter. before long after leaving school Brendan joined Fianna ireann, the youth organisation of the choler. In 1939, at the age of 16, he went on a bombing complaint to England provided now he was arrested and pitch to be in possession of explosives. He was sentenced to three years in a borstal institution in England but returned to Ireland in 1941. The spare-time activity year he was imprisoned in Ireland and released as set off of a general amnesty in 1946. He wrote roughly these years in his autobiography novel Borstal Boy. Upon his release he travel between Dublin, Kerry and Connemara, and spent some time in Paris, where he wrote in some(prenominal) Irish and slope. Behan sired his first adjoin The Quare Fellow in 1954 in Dublin. The sideline year he married Beatrice Ffrench-Salkeld. In 1958 Behan wrote his second put to work An Giall which was written in the Irish language and performed in the Dublin. That same year The warranter, which was Behans English language form of An Giall, met with great international mastery following Joan Littlewoods takings of it in London. Also in 1958 Borstal Boy was published and it became an conterminous best seller . Behans international success, along with the financial rewards, brought about an increase in his drinking problems. After years of heavy drinking he had demonstrable diabetes and it was due to this that he died, aged 41, on 20 March 1964 (OConnor, 1970).This part of the essay shall examine, and give a brief synopsis of, Behans three main works The Quare Fellow (1954), The hostage (1958) and Borstal Boy (1958). His first play The Quare Fellow is set in a Dublin prison on the eve of the act of the quare fellow, a colloquial term for someone on final stage sentence. One of the condemned prisoners, who has remove his wife, has been recently pardoned while the other prisoner, the quare fellow who has murdered his brother, has not. Although the quare fellow is the centrepiece of the play, it is not about him and he never appears or utters any words. There is no question of his guilt and he is not a likeable figure. The only sympathy for him is that he is going to be executed the fo llowing day. The play does not explore the effect of the execution on the quare fellow but looks at the effect on the prisoners, wardens and the hang earth himself. The virtuoso in the play is Warden Regan who is a devoted Catholic while also being a humanist. Although he accepts the system of the Church and Society, the humanity in him can see the hypocrisy in this system. The play ends the following cockcrow with the quare fellow being executed. The play is establish on Behans own experiences in Mountjoy prison, and it questions the right of any society to inflict or carry out the barbarous act of capital punishment which was still then in use in Ireland. It also attacks some of the false piety in attitudes in 1950s Ireland to sex, governing and religion (Russell,)The second play Behan wrote was An Gaill which was later translated into English and called The Hostage (1958). The play is set in Dublin guesthouse-cum-brothel during the late 1950s. It portrays the capturing and dete ntion of a young Cockney British soldier by the IRA in response to the planned execution, by the British, of an IRA voluntary in Belfast. The 19 year old British soldier has been kidnapped as he is leaving an Armagh Dance Hall. The IRA declares that it will shoot the hostage Leslie Williams, if their Belfast Boy is executed at Belfast Gaol the following morning. Private Williams is imprisoned in a lower class Dublin guesthouse-cum-brothel owned by a fanatical Gael. During the course of the play Leslie go in love with the young Irish convent girl, Theresa, and she also falls for him. They defy two grown up in similar backgrounds, both are orphans who now find themselves in a city that they are alien to, and neither of them cares much for any wars or battles that bring been fought between Britain and Ireland in the past or the present. The play is do up of a mutation of characters such as fallen rebel heroes, homosexual navvies, pimps and whores, convent girls and deteriorati ng civil servants who are loyal to the nationalist cause. Private Williams is entertained by them with jigs and reels, rock n roll dancing, rebel songs and tales about Irelands glorious past, and all the time the IRA guards await for newborns from Belfast.It is eventually only by accident that he discovers that he is the hostage and will be executed if the IRA put up in Belfast is hung. Towards the end of the play the manager of the place understands the futility of go on the Old fight but feels powerless to intervene. At the end of the play the news arrives that the IRA volunteer has been hanged and in the ensuing armed Garda tear on the brothel the hostage is accidently shot and killed. At the finale of the English version of the play the corpse of the stone-dead hostage rises up and sings The bells of blaze/ Go ting-a-ling-a-ling.Also in 1958 Behan released his autobiographical novel Borstal Boy. The harbour is ground on the three years that he spent in Hollesley call fo r Borstal in Suffolk, England, after being caught with explosives in Liverpool. It is a vivid memorial of the years that being spent there. Story depicts a young Behan, good of Republican fervour and idealism, softening his radicalism and warming to his fellow British inmates and the wardens cognise as screws. The story is not a venomous attack on Britain but instead it portrays Behans move away from radicalism and violence. The dialogue in the agree captures the lively interactions amongst the Borstal inmates along with all their various distinctive accents from around the British Isles. As the story develops Behan skilfully demonstrates that due to their working class, whether they are Irish Catholic or English Protestant, they share a lot more(prenominal) in common than they had realised. Behan realises that any supposed barriers of religion and ethnicity are just superficial and are beliefs that have been imposed on him by an restless middle class. Ultimately he emerges as a young man who is realistic and recognises the truth that violence, especially political violence, is futile. The image at end of the novel is of a young working class man, who has been stunted by crime and prison, coming right and growing into being an independent thinker, source and playwright (Kearney, 1970).In the three works of Behans that have been looked at in this essay there are a number of re-occurring themes to be found within them. The stories are written from a working class berth with socialist leanings. In these works Behan writes in his own voice and this is most obvious in the language used in the Borstal Boy. In this book Behan uses an engaging style of writing and incorporates the use of phonetic spelling in an interesting and creative way for an authentic effect. The narrative flow is sometimes condensed and other times heavily unhurried. All these works are based around some form of imprisonment and they are critical of both church and state, religion and th e power of authority. In the Quare Fellow we see Warden Regan doubting his society and battling with his conscience over the execution of even a blameful man. The theme of execution is also present in The Hostage with both Private Williams and the IRA volunteer awaiting possible execution. In The Hostage the confidential information theme is of a young innocents being set against those with political motivations and ambitions. The Hostage questions the futility of patriotic fervour and political violence (Jeffs,1966) and this theme is also found in the Borstal Boy which was based on Behans own experiences.Both The Hostage and Borstal Boy examining the Anglo-Irish relationship exploring the fact that there is very little contrariety between working class Irish Catholics or working class English Protestants. In Behans two plays he somewhat questions the Irish identity itself and the new young Irish Free State. The plays look at this new Free State and exposes that it is carrying o n the same practices of their old governing colonial power. For a Republican like Behan it must have seemed brutally wry that the official hangman for the Irish Free State was often an imported Englishman (Kiberd, 1989, p.336). In The Quare Fellow, Behan has the lags Dunlavin put it as the Free State didnt change anything more than the badges in the warders caps. The same olds class prejudices, which were imported from England, are still present and have not been rejected in the new Irish state. The Dublin Gaeilgeoir in the play represents this lack of change (Kiberd, 1989). John Brannigan, the author of the Behan biography Brendan Behan, cultural patriotism and the Revisionist Writer, questions some of the stereotypes that hang around the figure of Behan. He situates Behan amidst a generation of Irish writers in the mid-20th century Ireland having to deal with the dull, even deplorable aftermath of the previous, more heroic, age of Irish 20th century history. The forestall of the earlier decades of the 20th century was not delivered and their age was of disappointment and anti-climax (Brannigan, 2002).Unfortunately, the success that Behan received for his writing only increased his drinking problem and he played into the drunken Irishman caricature. After translating his work An Gaill into English he allowed Joan Littlewoods production of The Hostage to compromise and dilute the realism of the original Irish version by giving it interludes of music-hall singing and dancing (OConnor, 1970). At the end of The Hostage, when it finishes with the dead British soldiers corpse rising up and singing The bells of hell/ Go ting-a-ling-a-ling, we are left wondering not only about Behans politics but also about his literary integrity. After the Borstal Boy, Behan was unable to produce another classic. His later books like Brendan Behans Island and Brendan Behans revolutionary York could not be compared to his fountain works.Whatever criticism there may be of Behan s later works, it does not take away from what he has contributed to imagination of the Irish national identity. His work has been a significant influence to many writers and he has made his way into many Irish and international songs. The Auld Triangle, which is Behans prisoner song from The Quare Fellow, has stupefy something of an Irish folk standard and has been recorded on numerous occasion by groups such as The Dubliners and also The Pogues. Both of his plays, as advantageously as the Borstal Boy which was first made into a play in 1967, have still remained popular with Irish audiences (Murphy, 2014) and Borstal Boy was also made into a film in 2000.Word Count 2100BibliographyBrannigan, J., (2002) Brendan Behan, Cultural Nationalism and the Revisionist Writer. Dublin, Four Courts Press.Jeffs, R., (1966) Brendan Behan Man and Showman. London, Hutchinson Co.Kearney, C.,(1976) Borstal Boy A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Prisoner, Ariel. VII (April, 1976), pp. 47-62.Kiberd, D., (1989) Irish literature and of Irish history. In Foster, R.F., (1989) (ed.) The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland. Oxford, Oxford University Press.Murphy, C., (2014) Brendan Behan the borstal boy, boozer and bomb-maker, Irish Independent, 07 September.OConnor, U., (1970) Brendan Behan. London, Granada Publishing Ltd.Russell, R.R., (2002) Brendan Behans Lament for Gaelic Ireland The Quare Fellow. New Hibernia Review. 6 (1) pp. 73-93