SOURCE: Gillespie, Michael Patrick. “(S)he Was Too Scrupulous Always: Edna O'Brien and the Comic Tradition.” In The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers, edited by Theresa O'Connor, pp. 108-23. Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 1996.

In the following essay, Gillespie views humor as an integral part of O'Brien's short fiction and situates her within the Irish literary comic tradition.

Although a desolate, unforgiving atmosphere informs the narrative discourse in much of Edna O'Brien's writings, seeing her fiction as dour and pessimistic imposes a narrow, even reductive, view of her craft.¹ One can, in fact, gain a great deal of interpretive insight into O'Brien's work by remaining attentive to the way that she incorporates into her narratives common features of Irish humor. Indeed, by using the guidelines articulated in Vivian Mercier's classic study The Irish Comic Tradition, one quickly finds that humor—albeit at times quite singular—stands...