Plato’s Cave and the Image of the Family Home in John McGahern’s The Barracks

Abstract

This article argues that, in The Barracks, John McGahern’s literary production of the domestic familial space charts the fractures and partitions within that supposed unified space to reveal the anaemic passivity and alienating nausea that overcomes individuals within a prescriptive and totalising hegemony. It will discuss McGahern’s decision to withdraw his first novel from publication, and the reformation of the unpublished text into The Barracks. It expressly considers McGahern’s shifting of the spatial setting from the recognisable trope of the country kitchen to a Garda barracks and the impact this has on Elizabeth’s position within the family home, and therefore society. This article argues that the novel’s form addresses the dislocation of non-hegemonic or alternative family structures. McGahern’s staging of the narrative in the unfit and fractured domestic space of the barracks subverts traditional conceptions of ‘home’. This undermines the supposed impenetrable primacy of the family unit and highlights the bad faith and comely delusion of mid-century Ireland.