SOURCE: “Sex and Comedy in Patrick Kavanagh's The Great Hunger,” in Notes on Modern Irish Literature, Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring, 1995, pp. 34–40.

In the following excerpt, Holliday discusses the comic elements in The Great Hungerand the main character's symbolic castration.

In his short autobiographical book Self Portrait, Patrick Kavanagh claims that the “main feature” of a poet is his “humourosity” (27). Critics acknowledge that his long poem “The Great Hunger” is the great pastoral poem of the twentieth century for its harsh, realistic portrayal of an Irish rural life that has already largely vanished. Also, this poem is Kavanagh's “only major work with modernist affinities,” for the narrator's stance toward his main character “tends uncharacteristically toward nihilism” (Cantalupo 195). Simply put, Patrick Macguire is Kavanagh's version of the modern Irish antihero. The narrator of “The Great Hunger” must present the main character with empathy and compassion, for when Macguire speaks, he...