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Wifey Redux And Fusage Of Killary Analysis

Decent Essays
Literature, apart from being a channel to depict the author’s work and thoughts on a particular subject, is also interpreted as a medium to reflect norms, values, customs, and so on from different times in history. As stated by Milton C. Albrecht, literature reveals “the ethos of culture, the processes of class struggle, and certain facts of social facts.” (425) Through literary works, authors may be able to reflect their thoughts on specific issues, such as social injustices, or just point out the inequity between different social aspects, such as gender, class or social status. This essay, therefore, focuses on “Wifey Redux” and “Fjord of Killary”, two of Kevin Barry’s short stories from Dark Lies in the Island as well as on “Death of a Field” and “Number Fifty-Two” from Paula Meehan’s Painting Rain to show how inequities of class and social status in Irish society are visible through indirect reflections onto the natural and material worlds. On the one hand, Kevin Barry’s “Fjord of Killary” portrays how a man in his forties buys a twenty-three-bedroom old hotel on the fjord of Killary, in the west of Ireland, just to escape from “the city [that] had become a jag on my nerves – there…show more content…
Kevin Barry portrays the economic growth that the Irish society lived during the time he was writing Dark Lies in the Island. “Wifey Redux” depicts the easiness and flexibility that let young people to be owners of, for instance, their own house, and it was due, principally, for the Celtic Tiger, also known as the Irish economic growth fuelled by foreign investment between the 1990s and the 2000s. The young couple could even afford one of them staying at home without working, thus “Hubby went to work, and Wifey stayed at home” (9), but they were an “absolutely equal partnership.”
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