SOURCE: O'Connor, Honor. “Divining Stories: Underground Water in the Short Stories of Brian Friel.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 5, no. 1 (1999): 7-23.

In the following essay, O'Connor argues that Friel's stories are radical in the way they provoke thought about the social, moral, and political problems that face his characters.

The short stories of Brian Friel are to be enjoyed in their own right, not merely seen as apprentice work of a playwright and therefore interesting as a means of understanding his development as one of Ireland's leading literary figures. Some of the stories may be viewed as trial pieces not for public scrutiny but occasionally lifted out of their relative obscurity for specialists—rather like objects of archeological interest. In this article I propose to look at the ten stories which first appeared together in 1979 as The Diviner: The Best Stories of Brian Friel with an...