Character and Construction in Bernard Maclaverty's Early Short Stories About the Troubles (Critical Essay‪)‬

This essay analyzes five stories from Bernard MacLaverty's first two short story collections, Secrets (1977) and A Time to Dance (1982): 'A Happy Birthday'; 'Between Two Shores'; 'Father and Son'; 'My Dear Palestrina'; and 'The Daily Woman'. Each story engages explicitly or implicitly with the political conflict in Northern Ireland. The analysis focuses in particular on the issue of construction, as displayed in three different but intersecting areas. The first area of inquiry is rhetorical, relating to MacLaverty's construction of character, especially his choice of focalizer or point-of-view. The second area is architectural, relating to his construction of setting, and the striking fact that in these early Troubles stories a physical structure--usually, a building or a series of buildings--always plays a vital role. The third area is hermeneutical, relating to the form of construction that derives from the verb 'construe'. To put a construction on something is to interpret it, and MacLaverty's short Troubles fiction provokes the reader to construe the implications of the connections the stories construct among characters, buildings, and political conflict. **********