Thursday, August 21, 2008

Father Gaunt

Was he simply an evil misogynist, drunk on his own power? Did he have some other motivations? Is his character a commentary on Catholicism in Ireland?
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5 comments:

kc said...

I hate how he had the power to rip someone's heart out and crush it and effectively kill that person and make his followers believe that the Godly thing was to follow his lead. I hate how he could decide to destroy a life with no more thought than you'd give to deciding what kind of tea to drink. It's psychopathic, when you think about it.

His heart was a cold dead thing. He should have been institutionalized, not her, for all the unspeakable grief he introduced into the world.

2:23 PM, August 21, 2008
kc said...

And, yes, I think his character was definitely a commentary on Ireland. The worst abuses of the Catholic Church were magnified in Ireland because there were no brakes on it at all. It wasn't just a major religion, it was the culture — and a fiercely defended culture because of the "English threat." It was rotten and soulless to the core and it attracted the worst kind of domineering and corrupt personalities.

3:35 PM, August 21, 2008
Erin said...

Yes, I found the Father Gaunt passages difficult to read. The unchallenged power, the terrible un-Christian contempt for protestants, the disregard for human suffering. This scene set the tone:

Now the priest went a third time at the cigarette and found he already had quite an ash to deal with and in that silent dumbshow of smokers looked about for an ashtray, an item that did not exist in our house, even for visitors. My father astonished me by putting out his hand to the priest, admittedly a hard hand coarsened by digging, and Fr Gaunt astonished me by immediately flicking the ash into the offered hand, which perhaps flinched tinily for a moment when the heat hit it. My father, left with the ash, looked about almost foolishly, as if there might have been an ashtray put in the room after all, without his knowledge, and then, with horrible solemnity, pocketed it.

11:52 PM, August 23, 2008
kc said...

Yeah, that scene was something. It did set the tone.

And also, the early scene where young Roseanne went to fetch him to attend to the dead boy. You just had the sense that he was pissed off to be so inconvenienced, to be disturbed at home — and that he resolved to take it out on the family, like he was always keeping tally of minor things that bugged him and paid them back with major suffering.

12:16 PM, August 24, 2008
Erin said...

You're right. He was inconvenienced and embarrassed, so he decided to destroy someone's livelihood. It really is psychopathic, as you said.

9:24 AM, August 25, 2008

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