SOURCE: Pine, Richard. “The Short Stories.” In Brian Friel and Ireland's Drama, pp. 50-66. London: Routledge, 1990.

In the following essay, Pine elucidates the defining thematic concerns of Friel's short stories.

Silence once broken will never again be whole

—Samuel Beckett¹

Divination

Friel conveys the immediacy of ‘our’ world. It is not just the quotidian, workaday continuity of people's actions, but, as Seamus Deane observes, ‘that local intimate detail which emerges out of the author's knowledge of his society's moral code’.² Deane says that ‘each story is social in its setting, moral in its implications’ but this takes us only part of the way in understanding Friel's intentions. Beyond morality, beyond the social boundaries which the moral code dictates, there is a ‘quality of mercy’ which takes the form of a tenderness mediating between the wry and the grotesque. In the sense that Friel's stories have two dimensions, the...