Written in a hybrid of first-person narrative and stream of consciousness, critics marveled at Patrick McCabe’s unique use of rhythm and language upon the novel’s publication in 1992. Dark, haunting, and often screamingly funny, The Butcher Boy chronicles the pig boy’s ominous loss of innocence and chilling descent into madness. Nugent’s son, Francie finally finds a target for his rage, and a focus for his twisted, horrific plan. Nugent, and dropped by his best friend Joe in favor of Mrs. Held up for scorn and ridicule by the sanctimonious neighbor Mrs. As his troubled home life collapses, Francie retreats into a violent fantasy world. Set in a small town in Ireland in the early 1960s, The Butcher Boy is the story of Frances “Francie” Brady, also known as “pig boy,” the only child of an alcoholic father and a mother driven mad by despair. This paper also argues that the protagonist’s domestic sense of nostalgia represents a longing for reattaining traditional Irish identity.A powerful and unrelenting journey into a young boy’s heart of darkness, The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe is startlingly original and impossible to put out of your mind. This paper, suggesting that nostalgia becomes a pathology in Francie’s case, discusses the ways in which Francie, being overcome with a pathetic obsession to bring the past back, loses his touch with the reality of the present. McCabe’s protagonist, the schoolboy Francie Brady, undergoes a series of traumatic incidents triggered by his dysfunctional family, hypocritical and self-centered milieu and the corrupt public institutions. This sort of a ‘malignant’ nostalgia is delineated by Patrick McCabe, a pre-eminent contemporary Irish novelist, in his most acclaimed novel, The Butcher Boy (1992). post-traumatic states), the acuteness of nostalgic feelings is pathologically aggravated so as to lead individual to some belligerent and even delinquent conducts. Nostalgia etymologically corresponds to a longing for returning to a euphoric place or time in past. Journal of the American psychoanalytic association. Nostalgia: a ‘forgotten’ psychological disorder. International journal of applied psychoanalytic studies.

The anatomy of nostalgia: From pathology to normality.

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