Leavetaking And Homecoming

John McGahern is widely acclaimed as one of the finest Irish writers of his generation. The Guardian said that McGahern was arguably the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett. His novels and short stories are praised for their depictions of family life in rural Ireland during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Although there are certain critical monographs and essays on McGahern and his works overseas, we could find few experts or specialists who specialize in the study and research on McGahern and his works. The thesis has been written to remedy the imperfection in the domestic research on Irish literature.Amongst Women is McGahern's most successful and popular novel. The novel centers on the Moran family and Moran's patriarchal behavior and also concerns the progress of the nationalist movement after Irish independence. Michael Moran is the father of the novel, a veteran of Ireland's war of independence. He is dissatisfied with the society after the war. So he retreats into himself and his own family to achieve his own ideal. He wants to put right what is wrong in the outside world. He controls his family with physical violence. He must be the center of everything. All his sons and daughters can do is to bend to his violence. When they are growing up, the children escape from their father one by one, in order to find their own freedom and life. At the death of Moran, they come to the side of Moran, except his oldest son—Luke, although they have jobs and their own families in Dublin and London. It also shows McGahern's close attention and deep reflection on history, culture, politics, the dilemmas of postcolonial people in Ireland and other areas during postcolonial period.This thesis consists of four chapters: Chapter one is the background information, including a general introduction to John McGahern, the summary of Amongst Women, literature review and the theoretical basis; Chapter two shows the suffocating environment in history and in Moran's house; Chapter three is divided into two minor parts, analyzing Moran children's leave-taking and home-coming, and the theme of death in the novel are taken into account to reach the conclusion: as to the relationship between one's future and the past, compromise is a way to get some sense of achievement; what's more, one's duty is not to escape from the history but to rewrite and reinvent it by himself. Escape is not the proper way to solve all problems.