‘Extraordinary breathing space’:1 afterlife vision and redemption in the work of John McGahern
This chapter explores John McGahern’s evolving map of the boundary and potentially shared territory between this world and the other world. An unstable yet consistent concept of an ideal realm of immutable fulfilment, which can only ever be tenuously perceived let alone claimed, underlies much of McGahern’s starkly sympathetic portraiture of unfulfilled or delimited lives in mid-to-late twentieth century Ireland. How this notional ideal realm overlaps with or else is foreclosed upon by formal and informal concepts of the afterlife is the focus of this chapter. The reading offered traces how the fear of death which the young McGahern diagnoses as a driving force in so many of his characters – a force with the potential to constrict or enrich their lives – gradually gives way in his later fiction to characters whose acceptance of death paradoxically returns them to the possibility of full and open embracement of this life. The idea of a liminal existence in which the given world and otherworlds freely intermingle while remaining sharply defined in their own terms / realms, is explored as a key to McGahern’s larger vision.