A Coffin of Images: Uncanny Doubles in the Stories of John McGahern
A Coffin of Images: Uncanny Doubles in the Stories of John McGahern

Summary/Abstract: Like Stephen Daedalus, John McGahern‘s protagonists live in rural and urban backgrounds marked by dogmatism and inflexibility, as well as reverie and memory. Their existence is distanced or mirrored by close family members, linking complex events to personal discourses that often place characters on the edge of a dreaming state. This essay aims at exploring the Freudian uncanny in relation with the relatively quiet existence of characters in stories presenting their life journey and personal growth as a new reading of local Irish communities. How is the concept illustrated in novels and short stories? Does it entail ambivalence, splitting of ego, mainly in son-father relationships, the animate-inanimate opposition, or the phenomenon of the ―double‖ which leads to both division as well as interchanging of the self? Looking at examples extracted from The Dark, The Barracks and various short stories, it appears that the narrative often appeals to silence, premonition and hope as means to trigger certain suggestions, inflict uneasiness, and connect characters to the otherworld in an ongoing attempt to (re)configure and decode one‘s identity.

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