Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation”: A Civil War Story of Brother Against Brother?

Abstract

This article argues that one of Ireland’s literary greats Frank O’Connor (1903–1966) utilized the Irish War of Independence (WOI) as a backdrop for “Guests of the Nation,” one of the most famous works about the Irish revolutionary period. The 1931 short story is set during the Irish WOI (1919–1921). This essay, however, wishes to explore the notion that a subsequent but separate conflict—the Irish Civil War (1922–1923)—was at the forefront of O’Connor’s mind at the time of writing, with concepts of duty, brotherhood, and the questioning of hegemonic military codes suggesting the Civil War undercurrent throughout. Although the cast of characters presented in the story includes two captured English soldiers, Belcher and Hawkins (as well as their Irish captors Bonaparte—the narrator—Noble, and Jeremiah Donovan), the cottage and its inhabitants function, for the writer, as a literary prop that acts as a free landscape to create a “better world.” This, it is argued here, allowed O’Connor to articulate his primary thoughts around the societal influences formed during the Civil War, a conflict of which, in contrast to the WOI, the writer had direct experience.