Comment closely on ways in which the writer presents the relationships in the following passage from The Stoat.
In ‘The Stoat’, John McGahern uses dark, terrifying symbolism, tragic irony and shocking juxtaposition to present the strained and distant relationship the father and son share as well as their inability to communicate despite their desire to. He also explores the impact of grief on relationships as well as the dangerous impacts romantic love can have on a person.
Firstly, in this extract, McGahern explores the tense relationship between the father and the son and criticizes the vacancy and dichotomy between the two. He does not name the two characters, referring to them solely as ‘the father’ and ‘the son’ and uses a third person narrative – both of these techniques creating a sense of distance from the two characters for the reader: they feel impersonal and far-away. This effect reflects the nature and sense of their relationship. Indeed, the two don’t seem very close with the father untrusting and ‘plainly uneasy’ of his son’s cooking. It is clear their communication isn’t the best with the son withholding information from his father about the possibility of heart attacks happening ‘even in the act’. This suggests that he is too distant from his father to mention personal affairs such as sex (‘the act’) – perhaps his father is too prudish or simply unable to discuss anything intimate with his son: a sign of their impersonal relationship. Their dialogue at the end of this extract is symbolic of the widening distance between the two as the father goes home and the son leaves for his uncle’s. Their final exchanges diminish in sentence length as if the two were growing more and more apart till the last reply: ‘I’ll write.’ This promise seems very short, curt almost, and also the fact that the son is promising to write as if the two don’t plan on seeing each face-to-face anytime soon is perhaps a bleak foreshadowing that the son may end up following his own father’s path. By allowing himself to distance himself from his father, he is showing the possibility of him doing the same with others later in life. Perhaps his own relationship with his future children will be a repeat of his own with his father. Although McGahern could also be suggesting he may turn out different from his father by choosing to go to his uncle’s – preferring to pursue the only real relationship he has instead of privileging his bland, empty one with his father.
Furthermore, McGahern uses Miss McCabe and the uncle’s characters to exploit the hypocritical relationship the father and son share. Miss McCabe is the father’s adopted family figure – a new potential wife he went searching for – and the uncle, the father’s brother, is the son’s replacement father figure – a role that his own father doesn’t fulfil very well. Both have gone searching for people outside of their own relationship to complete the sense of a missing family connection yet ironically both want to have nothing to do with each other’s adopted family member and we, as the reader, suspect that they are actually jealous of each other’s connection. Indeed, the son gets upset and responds ‘cuttingly’ when it appears Miss McCabe is getting emotionally and affectionately involved in their family. Perhaps feeling afraid that he will completely lose his father (who is ‘singing’ about her, clearly very pleased with her) to her or that she will try and become his mother, the son now feels ‘soiled’ (admitting it is an ‘irrational’ feeling as if he is guiltily aware of his selfishness) and compares his father’s new relationship to ‘a buffoonery against (…) any sense of dignity’ whereas he previously seemed accepting of it. Similarly, the boy’s ‘reference to the uncle annoy[s] the father as much as Miss McCabe’s offer had the son’ – the father may feel jealous that the uncle has formed a close fatherly connection with his own son and stolen his role as father. Here, both are portrayed as hypocrites. They don’t want each other to have a deep connection with anyone else but they are unable to offer this connection too each other, too distant from each other to do so. This is a rather tragic depiction of their relationship. The desire to connect is there but the initiative to do so isn’t.
Lastly, McGahern uses the symbol of the stoat and the father’s abandoning of Miss McCabe as a warning that romantic love is a difficult thing that can have detrimental, tragic effects on people. He uses the contrast between the father and Miss McCabe to explore this. The father is generally negative and less enthusiastic in his behaviour, expressing his surprise that the rabbit actually tastes good whereas Miss McCabe is full of positive comments: her speech is largely composed of a lexical field of pleasant, good-natured adjectives and nouns ‘praise’ ‘good’ ‘nicer’ ‘very good’ and she also uses playful, vivid similes ‘as fat as butter’. The father has already been through marriage but his wife died, perhaps explaining why he is less positive and as full-of-life as Miss McCabe who has never experienced the hardship of losing a partner. This is when the image of ‘the stoat’ comes into play. With ‘terrifying clarity’ (as if he is only just realizing how much trauma his mother’s death had on his father), the son realizes his father sees the stoat in Miss McCabe’s hotel-room after her heart attack. The stoat represents death and loss and like the actual stoat haunted the son through its dangerous, bloodthirsty cruelty towards the rabbit, the father is haunted by the memory of the loss of his wife. When the son ‘teases out the dried blood where the vein had been cut’ on the rabbit, he mentions Miss McCabe’s arrival – an interesting juxtaposition. Is it possible McGahern is suggesting the father is like the rabbit? Miss McCabe’s arrival is a foreshadowing that she will ‘tease out’ his ‘dried blood’ from his wounds from the death of his wife ‘where the vein had been cut’, painfully awakening the memory of his wife. One could look on the father as being selfish for abandoning poor Miss McCabe so cruelly when ‘her head is full of plans’ (his declaration that ‘there’s nothing [he] can do about’ her hurt feelings emphasising his lack of compassion for her) but the reader is also encouraged to feel sympathy for the father. It is startling when the father is suddenly described as ‘shouting’ about having to bury another woman: this sudden outpour of intense emotion comes to a surprise to the reader – they are caught off guard by this sudden rise in emotion which was not indicated beforehand and contrasts with the son’s silence (‘he said nothing’). We see how upset he is about the idea of another loss and we can imagine how hurt and scarred he is from his wife’s death. He wants to avoid this emotional pain again even if it drives him to being selfish. He is like the rabbit, desperately escaping the stoat which is, in his case, a symbol of grief and loss.
In conclusion, McGahern presents relationships of every form as very delicate things. He warns of the consequences of strained parent-child relationships – they can lead to an endless cycle of distant generations – but also hints at the hope that the younger generation can learn from their parents’ mistakes. He also helps the reader to sympathise with the father, a victim of loss, and uses his grief, hurt and abandonment of Miss McCabe to suggest romantic relationships are very powerful and important: they can have serious impacts on people and cause people to overreact in unkind ways because of their desperation to escape living through the same tragedies.