Flann O’Brian: The Author’s Rhetorical Masks: At Swim-Two-Birds and Poor Mouth

Abstract

Each time the author puts up a mask, he does not hide , he exposes himself, he proffers his utterances and asserts his identity. Dissimulation, multiplication of personality, alienation under rhetorical masks characterise O'Brien's most famous works, and these features tell the difference between the nineteenth-century Lives of prominent people, written as examples to be emulated, and the modernist replacement of autobiography with authorial or figural masks. Enfolded selves and their dissolution into quanta of personality towards multiple possibilities are effects of deconstruction of rationalist metaphisics, readers are forced to reconsider their point of view and experience of the story. It is the author's approach of ”Spiegel im Spiegel” , reflective of a world from which certainty has fled away never to return. Ahead of his time, his writings chime better with our sensibilities.