42 pages • 1 hour read
Flann O'BrienA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Fergus MacPhellimey the Pooka, the Good Fairy, Slug, Shorty, Jem Casey, and Sweeny travel to the Red Swan Hotel. They stop only to eat and drink what they find in the forest. At all times, they talk about a range of subjects and sing a variety of songs, both traditional and classical.
The student drunkenly returns to his uncle’s house in the early spring. His uncle is hosting a meeting and invites his nephew to sit at the table to act as the secretary. The men around the table are plotting a traditional dance known as a ceilidhe, and they disagree about the type of music that should be played, about how to welcome a guest of honor, and about how much alcohol they should acquire. After votes, stories, and other bureaucratic procedures, the student’s uncle gives each man at the meeting an assignment. The meeting ends.
Fergus MacPhellimey the Pooka, the Good Fairy, Slug, Shorty, Jem Casey, and Sweeny arrive at the Red Swan Hotel and enter through the “maids’ private bed-room on the ground floor” (114). They lay their gifts down for Sheila to find them. While they wait for the imminent birth, they play a hand of cards. As he deals, Fergus tells a story about his friend Dermot, who “ran away with Granya, the woman of Finn Mac Cool” (116). Finn chased after the fleeing lovers, who come to Fergus’s house. As the characters increase their bets, Fergus explains how he sheltered Dermot and Granya. Dermot plays chess with Fergus, but Fergus beats him in two moves. Fergus later beats Granya in a different game of chess. Fergus wins the game of poker, and the Good Fairy, asking for a word in private, reveals that he has no money to pay the debt. Fergus offers to forget the debt and give the fairy sixpence—if the fairy absolutely relinquishes his “claim to influence the baby” (118) that is about to be born. The fairy, fearful for his reputation, reluctantly agrees but swears revenge against the Pooka. They return to the card game as the baby’s birth draws closer.
The student complains that he struggles to describe “the birth of Mr. Trellis’s illegitimate offspring” (119). He decides to abandon this passage of the manuscript but notes that the idea of a writer fathering a son with his own character intrigued the student’s friends. The student explains that Trellis didn’t kill off his characters simply because he was spending more time asleep.
Sheila gives birth to a “stocky young man” (120) named Orlick who interrupts the card game to thank the characters for their gifts. He admits that he’s surprised that his father wasn’t present for his birth and mentions that his mother blushed when he raised this subject with her. As the Good Fairy bickers, the other characters raise toasts to Orlick’s birth. Fergus leads Orlick aside for a conversation about how the Pooka can influence the new arrival’s future.
The student outlines his typical schedule when writing his novel. He spends most of his day sleeping or talking to friends. He compares this schedule to those of the members of a Methodist church and to Finn Mac Cool.
Fergus MacPhellimey the Pooka has “won dominion over Orlick by virtue of superior card-play,” so he takes Orlick back to his home for six months to sow in him “the seeds of evil, revolt, and non-serviam” (123). Meanwhile, Trellis is “almost perpetually in a coma” (123) because he is drugged by Furriskey, allowing Furriskey to enjoy life with his new wife, Peggy. Shanahan and Lamont continue to drink heavily and live a colorful lifestyle. They talk to the Furriskeys about music and instruments. Furriskey denies that he can play the fiddle, despite the petitions of the other characters. They discuss famous fiddlers from history, including Pegasus and Nero. As they talk, many of the finer details of their historical knowledge are false or mistaken. They discuss how to remove pimples and boils. Shanahan tells a story about a man named Bartley Madigan who hurt his knee and nearly died but spent the next 20 years of his life paralyzed. They discuss other injuries until they’re interrupted by the arrival of Orlick, who is supposedly going to do “a bit of writing” (131).
In the late summer, the student lays on his bed while talking to Brinsley about the manuscript. Brinsley struggles to distinguish between Furriskey, Shanahan, and Lamont. To prove their differences, the student lists the “respective diacritical traits or qualities of Messrs. Furriskey, Lamont and Shanahan” (132). The student’s uncle walks into the bedroom; the student senses that his uncle and Brinsley are teaming up to “humiliate” (133) him about his lazy habits. After praising the benefits of exercise, the uncle and Brinsley exit the house and go together for a late evening walk.
After learning about the Pooka’s influence, Orlick continues to live in Fergus’s house. Shanahan and Lamont, enjoying their freedom, worry that Trellis will develop a natural tolerance for the sleeping draught that his characters constantly feed him. They visit Furriskey to develop a plan for this potential eventuality. They discover that Orlick has “inherited his father’s gift for literary composition” (134) and they plan to use Orlick’s skills against Trellis. Orlick agrees and, together, the characters start work on a manuscript of their own.
In the characters’ manuscript, Dermot Trellis sleeps peacefully in his bed in the Red Swan. He wakes up to find a cleric named Moling in his room. Moling wants to “make a bargain” (136), and his acolytes prepare the area outside for Trellis’s arrival. Shanahan is annoyed that Orlick is taking too long to get to the point. Orlick insists that “you cannot drop a man unless you lift him first” (136), and he asks for patience. The characters debate whether they could kill Trellis with a needle or a steamroller. Shanahan argues that Orlick’s insistence on extravagant prose won’t appeal to “the man in the street” (138). Orlick starts again.
The student returns home to find his uncle meeting with his similarly middle-aged friends in the house. The middle-aged men bring the student into the room and force him to play the role of stenographer for their conversation. As he takes notes, they bicker and argue just like the student and his friends—and just like the characters in the student’s novel. In essence, all conversations share similar traits regardless of the participants. These similarities show the fundamental interconnectedness of seemingly disparate individuals and groups. A meeting of men bickering about music genres is remarkably like the political discussion between a fairy and a poet because people remain fundamentally the same. Significantly, the student is reduced to the role of writer in each of these situations. The way the men make him take notes on their argument suggests that the student lacks a similar degree of control over his characters. Rather than telling them what to say or when to say it, he’s just diligently recording the conversation for posterity. Rather than an all-powerful writer with the power of creation, the student is just a notetaker, scribbling down events and conversations that he witnesses. Just as Trellis’s characters take over the role of writing, the characters in At Swim-Two-Birds lead the way and expect the student to follow.
In addition, the novel introduces a dichotomy between Fergus the Pooka and the Good Fairy. According to Irish folklore and as mentioned in the novel’s introduction, Fergus is a malicious spirit who is well practiced in the art of mischief. On the opposite side, the Good Fairy supposedly represents a more moral position, to the extent that he’s explicitly called the Good Fairy. The Pooka and the fairy compete for influence over Orlick’s life, suggesting that the Pooka would steer Orlick toward a more mischievous future, while the Good Fairy would help guide Orlick toward a moral and benevolent existence. However, this good and bad dichotomy is proven false. Fergus is a quiet, reserved family man with many practical ideas. He offers sensible advice and is kind and polite to everyone he meets. The Good Fairy is more chaotic. The fairy bounces around, doing as he pleases, and rarely says a good word to anyone. Furthermore, he gambles with other people’s money and forces Fergus into the embarrassing position of covering his losses when he loses at cards. The fairy may traditionally represent the moral influence over Orlick’s life, but the Pooka is better liked, more moral, and more intelligent than the fairy. The nuances of this false dichotomy reinforce the novel’s position that life is too complex to be reduced to something as simple as good versus bad.
When presented with an extract from the student’s manuscript, Brinsley comments that many of the characters seem to speak with one voice. His criticism is an ironic reference to the novel’s structure. In At Swim-Two-Birds, the characters exist in a novel within a novel. They’re supposedly all the creation of Trellis, who is in turn the creation of the student, who exists in the context of At Swim-Two-Birds. Brinsley is right, as the characters are all speaking with the same authorial voice because the same man created them all. However, both he and the student are also the creations of a single individual, and they’re characters within their own work of fiction. Just as the student’s uncle and his friends speak and argue in a manner like that of Trellis’s creations, all the characters in the novel are part of the same multistranded narrative. They’re all separate yet all the same, brought together by their involvement in the complex structure of At Swim-Two-Birds. As such, the novel is a self-portrait masquerading as a narrative, in which the characters offer literary criticism that can equally apply to the novel in which they exist.
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