Brian Friel: Ireland's changing narrator

Irish dramatist Brian Friel has utilized a variety of different types of narrators throughout the course of his thirty-year playwriting career. Each of these plays involve the themes to which Friel has continually returned, themes with strong social, political, and religious/spiritual undertones, inevitably within an Irish context. This study explores the ways in which Friel's constant use of a different variety of narrators interacts with and reinforces his recurring themes. The six plays examined are The Loves of Cass McGuire, Lovers, The Freedom of the City, Living Quarters, Faith Healer, and Dancing at Lughnasa.;Initially, Friel's use of narrators may appear too eclectic to be of much use in understanding his themes in any systematic fashion. Yet, in the end, it is the very diversity of Friel's narrators that serves his themes so well, for if there is one constant theme in Friel's work, it is the various ways in which individuals and nations attempt to come to terms with the past. This exploration is never presented as a simple search for one true interpretation of what actually happened. The past is too complex for that. Rather, for Friel, the past is both what actually happened and also how we chose to remember what actually happened. The past, in other words, is specific, and at the same time, relative. The diversity of Friel's narrators emphasizes that there is no single approach in the exploration of the past. In particular, Friel emphasizes that Ireland's past should be viewed with the same balance of the specific and the relative.;This study explores Friel's narrated plays with a particular emphasis on the relationship between narrators and audiences. The narrators of Friel's plays utilize their narrative powers, in part, to present what they think the past is. The audience must balance the various discordant voices that are addressing them from the stage in an effort to reach some sort of usable understanding of the story in question. Metaphorically, Friel suggests that the Irish must balance the various voices claiming to speak for them in their search for an understanding of Ireland's past.