Come resistere alla narrazione e deformare il romanzo di formazione: The Hard Life di Flann O’Brien

Abstract

Peculiar formulation that mimics the expectations of self-cultivation and subverts its narrative modes, The Hard Life, Flann O'Brien's fourth novel, is again, very much like his prose, difficult to be categorized. Generally and simplistically defined as an-all Irish example of Bildungsroman, the novel strikes for the presentation of an environment in which comic transgressions seek to invalidate the social occasions which the protagonist finds himself in. While the conventions of the genre itself invoke a possible but distant progression and acquired maturity for the unhero, a story of failure and despair, an 'exegesis of squalor' takes over, with attacks to the Roman Catholic Church and the education received at its schools as a constant motif. The aim of my contribution would be to analyze the way in which language is used as a source of humour to give voice to the story of an orphaned distanced narrator named Finbarr and evaluate the success that the text has had throughout the years, since its first publication.