Are You Somebody? Literary Elements

Autobiography

Ireland during the life of Nuala O'Faolain

The narrator is Nuala in the first person. She is critical of the poverty and patriarchy in Ireland at the time.

The tone is critical of the patriarchal system that condemned women who got children out of wedlock and the mood is melancholy for the narrator narrates the harsh life in Ireland.

The antagonist of the book is the system of patriarchy and poverty that led to many people leading harsh lives. The protagonists are all the characters in the book who aim to rise above the system.

The major conflict of the book is Nuala's pursuit for love and happiness as she had read in the novels.

Nuala falls in love with a man named Michael and they establish a happy relationship.

When the maid who worked in the home of Nuala gave birth, the grandmother remarked that the child was sickly and sinking into death. The child died later.

Nuala says regarding her father, ' Gay and my father both transcended the cautiousness of their backgrounds.' This is an understatement because Nuala's father often left his family behind and they suffered without him for they were dependent on him.

Literary allusion to a Henry Green novel. Nuala says that in the novel there was a picture of two girls dancing together which is similar to her mother dancing with a schoolmate.

Nuala described their house as, 'We were living then in a crumbling rectory with lovely drawing rooms and an overgrown garden with a dog's graveyard behind the apple trees, and stone flagged sculleries full of spiders.' The description of the house contains visual imagery.

The narrator says that her mother was the motherless of women. This is paradoxical because her mother had a mother.

A parallel is drawn between when children were part of the tribe and when they went away to work. The narrator says, ' Children are toughened early- sent out into the world with their cardboard suitcases, one-minute warm in the tribe the next minute walking down the steps of some distant railway station into a world they must handle on their own.' The sentence contrasts the warmth of the tribe to the coldness of the world that the children were going to.

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