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The use of strangers or foreigners to produce comic effects is a well-known pattern engendered by a number of reasons which philosophers have studied in detail. The Irishman is no exception here, whether described at home or abroad, and many are the examples to be found not only in England or the United States, but also in Ireland or in France. But does a nation also produce specific forms of the comic ? This would seem to be the case. In Ireland, historical and other circumstances have developed particular comic genres and devices strikingly different from those of comfortably established countries., L'utilisation de l'étranger pour faire rire est chose coutumière, pour des raisons que les philosophes ont largement étudiées. L'Irlandais n'échappe pas à la règle, et nombreux en sont les exemples, en Angleterre, aux États-Unis, et même en Irlande et en France, que cet Irlandais soit présenté chez lui ou au dehors. Mais une nation crée-t-elle aussi les formes de son comique ? Il semble bien que ce soit le cas et qu'en Irlande, ce comique spécifique — qui s'explique, entre autres, par l'histoire — débouche sur des procédés qui diffèrent singulièrement de ceux des pays confortablement établis., Rafroidi Patrick. Comique et nationalité : L'exemple irlandais. In: Études irlandaises, n°14-2, 1989. pp. 23-31.

In the Dublin General Post Office, the headquarters of the 1916 Revolution, Oliver Sheppard’s bronze memorial to the men who started the struggle and sacrificed their lives represents the Celtic warrior Cuchulain — the main hero of the Ulster cycle — tied to a stone pillar facing his enemies, with the raven goddess of war perched on his shoulder, a reminder of whom the revolutionary leader Patrick Pearse ‘summoned to his side’[1] and an apt symbol of the strange marriage which it is our task to try and describe here in the background of, essentially, the first quarter of the twentieth century in Ireland.

The French consider Beckett as their own, and Beckett, who has chosen their language and their culture has given them good reasons for this. Even when works of fiction first written in English are concerned, Murphy, for instance, the author has refused to be described as « Irish » and devoted part of his creative powers to sneer at his native country, its inhabitants and types (e.g. the Stage-Irishman) and to parody some of its institutions (e.g. the Abbey), its artists (Yeats, Clarke) and its symbols (Cathleen ni Houlihan). It is not so much Ireland that Murphy, a novel of refusal, condemns, however, as the land that has given birth to the hero or anti hero and his creator ; besides, condemned or otherwise, that land remains everpresent, sometimes to the point of recalling Joyce. Yet the two novelists are also strikingly different in achievement as well as in racial, social and religious sensibility. If Beckett appears simply « Irish » in his « Freudian blarney : Sodom and Begorrah » — to quote Dylan Thomas — his mental attitudes are essentially « Anglo-Irish » stricto sensu and so is, in part, his art of comedy reminiscent of Sheridan and Wilde and, when flavoured with a touch of the Abbey, in spite of his sarcasms, more akin to that of his fellow Protestant, Synge, than to any other playwright. The Puritanism of the Anglo-Irish variety is fundamental to an understanding of Murphy in which a Swiftian dislike for the body and bodily functions is more prominent than a Joycean tendency to make fun of them. Beckett thought that « the artist who stakes his whole being comes from nowhere » . This is patently not the case in as far as he is concerned and Ireland also is entitled to claim him as part of one of her traditions., Rafroidi Patrick. Pas de Shamrocks pour Sam Beckett ? La dimension irlandaise de « Murphy ». In: Études irlandaises, n°7, 1982. pp. 71-81.