Frank O'Connor: life and literary works

¶ … Drunkard

The sins of the child eradicating the sins of the father -- point-of-view in "The Drunkard" by Frank O'Connor

Drink, you see was father's great weakness." The title of Frank O'Connor's short story "The Drunkard" is deliberately misleading, as are many of the early clues in the narrative detailing the father's love of drink. Because of the caution that drink was the father's weakness early on in the tale, the reader expects the story to be about the narrator's father, and tell the tale of the man's descent into alcoholism. Instead, the narrator looks back in time and illustrates an event from his childhood that permanently altered his relationship with his father and his father's relationship with alcohol in an unintentionally positive fashion. The constant shifting from child's perspective to the narrator's adult's-eye view allows who is the drunkard of the tale to take the reader by surprise. Also, rather than a sad tale of the father's alcoholism, the story becomes a funny and ultimately uplifting tale of how the young boy fulfilled his mother's implied plea to guard his father and to act as a brake upon the man's weakness.

Ironically, an early distaste for drink is ominous for the father's narrator. "It was a bad sign [the father's rejection of drinking as a young man]...Sooner or later; the spiritual pride grew until it called for some celebration." The tone of this observation illustrates how the narrator is telling the tale of his father's first fall from grace, and frequent falls from grace afterward his first early decision not to drink, with the wisdom and analytical perspective of an adult. The narrator knows where drink will take his father, and what will happen because of drinking later in the story, although the young boy does not. "He could keep steady for months, even for years, at a stretch, and while he did he was as good as gold." Half-humorously, half-ruefully, the narrator looks back at his role in his father's increasingly pervasive illness: "As a brake I had never achieved anything, but Mother still had great faith in me." Eventually, the boy did have an effect as a brake, but not in the way that his mother expected.

Despite the adult's point-of-view used early on in the story, it is clear that even as a boy, the narrator had some insight into his father's condition, and what would set his father off on a drunken binge. At times, the narrative voice blends in to the perspective of the boy: "I knew the danger signals were there in full force: a sunny day, a fine funeral, and a distinguished company of clerics and public men were bringing out all the natural vanity and flightiness of Father's character," he writes of his presence with his father at Mr. Dooley's funeral. "I felt if I was to act as a brake at all, this was the time, so I pulled Father by the coattails. Just a bottle of lemonade and we'll go home. This was a bribe, and I knew it, but I was always a child of weak character."

This observation shows the tension between the boy's knowingness about his father's weakness, even at a young age, and the narrator's greater knowingness, of his own and father's fate. It is also touching how the boy senses his responsibility to act as a 'brake,' a duty given to him by his mother, but also his childlike ability to be temporarily soothed by a treat. The weakness for drinking will obviously manifest itself in much more dramatic perspective later on in the boy's behavior. Gradually, the child's more limited and immediate perspective takes over as the narrative begins to focus more immediately on the specific details of preceding incident, such as when it strikes him as "very cool, the way grown-ups assumed that you could play all by yourself on a strange road," and when he takes his first sip of his father's drink: "It was a terrible disappointment. I was astonished that he could even drink such stuff. It looked as if he had never tried lemonade." This child's perspective adds to the humor of what follows.

Gradually, to describe the feeling of drunkenness as a child, he slips back into adult language by necessity, to avoid sounding incoherent. He reflects that the: "wonderful thing about porter was the way it made you stand aside, or rather float aloft like a cherub rolling on a cloud, and watch yourself with your legs crossed, leaning against a bar counter, not worrying about trifles but thinking deep, serious, grown-up thoughts about life and death." The disapproving comments of the "shawlies" or women watching the boy get sick voice the reader's likely feelings about the incident: "isn't it the likes of them would be fathers?"

The narrator's voice from then on, also by necessity, is more coherent than the interior voice of a tipsy child, but he still tries to convey the child's physical sense of discomfort, like the child's anger that he does not feel "grand" like his father assures him that he will after he is ill, or when his father's friends tell him he will feel right in a minute. "I never met two men who knew less about the effects of drink," the child thinks, attempting to give a sense to the reader of his profound physical discomfort and the child's interior monologue at the time.

The story would not be able to be told if it were entirely narrated in the boy's young perspective, given his condition. Also, the adult narrative tone of retrospective allows the author to paint a picture of how the town sees the drunkenness of the young boy. "They all stopped gabbling to gape at the strange spectacle of two sober, middle-aged men bringing home a drunken small boy with a cut over his eye...I began to sing a favorite song of Father's." The young boy would obviously not notice the reactions of the townspeople very much at the time. This also raises the likelihood that the adult narrator is taking some liberties in painting the picture of what transpired after he became drunk, or even that he has discussed at least some of what followed with his father.

However, he has clearly not discussed all of the emotional implications of the incident with his father. Even as an adult he admits he is uncertain of what his father felt -- fear, when he first saw the boy's condition, then shame and guilt. This confusion of emotions causes the man to wrestle with the desire to get the boy home to safety as soon as possible, and away from the prying eyes of neighbors, yet also to explain the boy's singing, anger, and behavior. "Twill be all over the road," whimpered Father. "Never again, never again, not if I lived to be a thousand!' To this day I don't know whether he was forswearing me or the drink."