Back to Frankie's
ESL Worksheets
PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA, Roddy Doyle
NOTES
General
- The story of a boy growing up in 1960s working class Dublin … The boy’s family is central to his existence, yet his parents grow increasingly apart, bickering and fighting steadily; his father eventually strikes his mother and leaves soon after… Meanwhile, Paddy grows anxious, loses sleep, deliberately toughens himself and loses his friends …
- Remarkable for its authentic “child’s eye” view of events …
- Themes: the loss of childhood innocence; the Family; the marvellous nature of a child’s imagination; the harshness of life and the cruelty of children (Lord of the Flies?) …
Setting
- Dublin, Ireland, the 1960s (references to George Best; The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; the Cuban missile crisis; etc.) … Barrytown, a working class suburb: some families, like Paddy’s, own their own houses and uses terms like “drawing room”; others live in more modest rented Corporation houses and talk about the “television room”… Most children attend local schools; a few attend privileged schools elsewhere …
- The setting is reflected in a lot of local slang: gick, eccer, spa, mickey/diddy, mitching etc.
- New estates and roads are being built, gradually erasing the fields and farms where Paddy and his friends once played … (A metaphor that mirrors the breakdown of Paddy’s family?)
- The Catholic church is a dominant influence: Paddy makes home-made communion hosts and aspires to be an heroic missionary like Father Damien; the house has a picture of the Sacred Heart; exclamations frequently refer to Jesus or a saint; Paddy thinks about mortal/venial sins and worries about purgatory.
Point of view
- The narrator is Paddy Clarke. He generally speaks in the short, simple sentences of a child: “My da’s hands were big. The fingers were long. They weren’t fat.” The syntax is hardly ever complex. The lexis is generally simple too. There is a lot of dialogue.
- On the other hand, when Paddy recounts stories or facts he has read, his language often reflects the complexity of the original text (for example, in the Father Damien story, “The bishop was pleased and edified by the bravery of his young missionary”).
- The narrative is not linear. It moves around unpredictably like a child’s thought processes. One moment, Paddy is describing a row between his parents; the next, he is reciting unconnected facts about the inventor of television, capitals of countries, the 1936 Olympics etc.
- The novel is full of chants and songs (including the poignant “Paddy Clarke/ has no da/ Ha ha ha”) that reflect a child’s fascination with the power of words. There is a memorable scene in which Paddy and friends dance around a fire, chanting odd-sounding or obscene words in a ritualistic manner. Paddy wonders why a drawing room is not a room where people draw things … Irish is used quite a lot in school, reflecting national pride …
- Paddy is evidently intrigued by contrasts between his own family and others, especially the fact that some school friends have no mother. His fascination with incomplete or dysfunctional families implies how important his own “complete” family is to his sense of identity.
- Paddy is an eavesdropper on the growing conflict between his parents. He does not fully understand what he observes. He believes that he can control the situation by means of willpower (“—Stop. There was a gap. It had worked; I’d forced them to stop.”)
Tone
- The dominant tone for about 200 pages or so is one of delight in in mischief, in language, in knowledge. A child is learning about the world.
- Towards the end, however, a more serious, anxious, tense tone enters the narrative (“They were fighting all the time now. They said nothing but it was a fight … The silences were worst, waiting for it to start again, or louder.”). The tone becomes especially painful as Paddy becomes aware of his loneliness and tries to understand the disintegration of his parents’ relationship: “Why didn’t Da like Ma? She liked him; it was him didn’t like her. What was wrong with her?”
- The conclusion of the novel is very understated. Paddy sees his father hit his mother. His mother composes herself and speaks kindly to Paddy. Paddy Sr tries to act as if nothing has happened. Paddy speaks politely to both parents (“Thank you very much.”). His father leaves home the same day. When his father returns around Christmas, Paddy speaks to him again in the formal tone (“Very well, thank you.”) which has become his defence against the harshness of life.