Families Portrayed In Roddy Doyles Books Essay -- essays research pape

Families Portrayed In Roddy Doyle's Books Why do we hear so much about family these days? Perhaps it is because relationships between family members are assumed to be the prototype for all other social relations. In the novels, The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van, Roddy Doyle shows his support of the family as an institution. Each character demonstrates strength and direction within the family unit. However, when the stability of the family is threatened, each character breaks down along with the family itself. When we think of family life we associate happiness, a life of sharing memories and developing unbreakable friendships. It is easy to create a family that is make believe, we just tend to leave the ugly side of the relationship out. It may be true that there is a family that lives like the "Cleavers" in our society today, but speaking realistically every family will breakdown eventually. In an interview about his novels the author said, "I didn't set out to capture the good in every family, or bad for that matter, I just wanted to show a typical Irish family."1 Doyle's writing is real--he deals with issues that might not hit home with every reader however, they are events that confront many people every day. The Rabbitte family is used in all three novels that make up the "Barrytown Trilogy." While the times are both good and bad for the eight members of this Irish family, in some way they find a way overcome every problem that faces them. One of Doyle's strengths is his feel for personality: his characters are neither devils nor clowns, dolts nor wits, but wobble between the extremes. "They're fish gutters and mechanics, young knockabouts and unemployed workers who spend a lot of time watching T.V. drinking Guinness and jawing at the pub, trying to stave off the feelings that they are nondescript people in a nondescript world."2 The Commitments is Doyle's first full-length novel. The main character Jimmy Rabbitte, the eldest son, puts together a band. It is almost every teenager's dream, at some point, to be famous playing music in front of large groups of people. In fact, this is how this book started off. In the end, however, it turns out to be the complete opposite. Doyle captures ... ... about unemployment and welfare. One night when the family is eating Darren says something to upset his father whose reply is: "Darren, don't you forget who paid for tha' dinner in front of you, son, righ' -I know who paid for it, said Darren. -The state did."7 This reaction not only made Jimmy Sr. upset but, he came to terms with the fact that he was going nowhere and if he wanted things to get better he had better get a job soon. The Rabittes may have gone through times when they wanted to kill each other, but other times they cared. Doyle is a down-to-earth writer, he shows the way of life for many families with the use of slang in his writing and his abillity to capture humour when the times are hard. The Rabbitte family shared many bonds, they had many memories and of course many fights, but they are a family. They may be fictional but they represent a modern family. It is true that when the stability of the family is threatened, each character breaks down along with the family itself.