Narrating through Comics in Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy

Patrick McCabe's 1992 novel The Butcher Boy—narrated in the arresting first-person voice of Francie Brady—has attained near-canonical status among contemporary Irish novels. Francie, in his early teens in small-town Ireland in the 1960s, loses his mother to suicide and his father to alcoholism, and subsequently murders the mother of his childhood enemy. In the first sentence of his retrospective account of these events, Francie divulges that "When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs. Nugent."¹ In the course of the story, we watch as he kills her with the gun that he uses to kill pigs at the local abattoir, cuts her up, and then pushes her remains around for an entire day in his meat cart. Mrs. Nugent's crimes against Francie include her smug Englishness (the Nugents have just returned from living in England) and her air of superiority toward Francie's broken family. Moreover, Francie believes that she causes his only friend, Joe, to turn against him. The drama of social ills and violence unfolds exclusively through Francie's voice; thus, we find in The Butcher Boy the personal narrative of a murderer. The relentless narration of McCabe's novel creates an opening into the mind of a young killer that is both compelling and shocking.

The first-person narrative, according to one recent persuasive reading, functions as a commentary on twentieth-century Irish society; Francie may be best understood as a survivor of the flawed institutional system for dealing with those who do not fit the national mold of de Valéra's Ireland. He is a victim of an "array of interdependent institutions . . . that obscured the less desirable elements attached to a number of interrelated social phenomena, including poverty, illegitimacy" and more.² Francie is indeed admitted, or committed, three times to institutions: first to an industrial school where he is abused and molested; second to a mental hospital; and finally, he is locked away in a prison for the criminally insane. Reading The Butcher Boy as survivor testimony thus "exposes Irish society's deployment of an architecture of containment to police and maintain the nation's nativist imaginary."³ In this context, Francie Brady emerges as a monster created by society—a product of isolation, misunderstanding, and psychopathologies engendered by the abuses and failures of institutions in Ireland and the shortcomings of the community as a whole.

Discussions of McCabe's novel within this general framework range in approach from cultural critique to psychoanalysis. Of the latter strain, John Scaggs argues that Francie, "like any language user," finds language "insufficient to deal with both the self and the world" beyond.⁴ Francie counters this linguistic inadequacy by refusing to enter Lacan's mirror stage, thus returning to a "pre-linguistic space, to refuse the burden of subjectivity, and to remain in isolation from the world."⁵ Scaggs identifies the process of linguistic fracture as a direct result of Francie's lack of family coherence, and his recourse to repetitive role-playing then occurs in lieu of performing his own "self." Scaggs's reading, therefore, still allows us to place at least some of the burden of blame upon Francie's non-nurturing familial environment and society's failure to provide successful mechanisms for support and intervention. In contrast, some remain skeptical of the idea that Francie Brady's narrative provides any coherent social commentary at all, preferring resolutely psychiatric diagnoses for Francie's problems.⁶ Francie Brady might be a paranoid schizophrenic or simply a misanthropic liar.

Yet this unreliable narration—Francie's idiosyncratic voice—is not the simple symptom of his psychosis, but rather, the key to The Butcher Boy. His narrative is not the grid of containment to look beyond but the necessary object of analysis, for Francie's narration can be reconceived by revealing McCabe's debt to the representational strategies of the modern comic book. In turn, the language of Francie...