At Swim-Two-Birds

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1939

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Pages 1-35

Pages 35-70

Pages 70-107

Pages 107-138

Pages 138-175

Character Analysis

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Character Analysis

The Student

The student is the unnamed protagonist of At Swim-Two-Birds. He is the author of the novel in which most of the characters exist, and the slow process by which he writes and shares the novel forms the student’s narrative—coupled with his antagonistic relationship with his uncle and drunken escapades with his friends. The student is an intelligent young man but, as he’s the first to admit, is indolent and indulgent. He drinks too much beer and doesn’t like leaving his room. One reason he rankles so much at his uncle’s criticism is that he fears it’s true, and even he can recognize the dull, fetid smell that sticks to his house-worn clothes. Despite this guilty laziness, the student convinces himself that he has a higher purpose. His novel is more important to him than his schoolwork, and he believes that his fusion of Irish folklore and modern metafiction will provide insight into the human condition for a contemporary audience. Like everything else in the student’s life, however, he approaches writing with a half-hearted energy. Passages of his manuscript are left blank or replaced by summaries, while other sections are just borrowed from newspapers or dictionaries. As much as the student is certain that he has a higher purpose in life, he cannot escape his own flaws.

As a writer, the student’s flaws become embedded in his work. While he doesn’t write about himself, many of his interests and anxieties work their way into the manuscript. He studies Irish folklore at university, for example, so he can recreate the stylistic flourishes of traditional storytelling, and he includes characters like Finn Mac Cool and Mad Sweeny, retelling their stories in slightly altered ways that take up large swaths of the manuscript without inducing more hard work on the student’s behalf. His laziness and appreciation of Irish folklore combine into retellings of traditional stories so that he doesn’t need to write new or original material. Similarly, the discourse in the novel about working-class politics suggests that the student cares about these ideas, but he approaches them from the position of a bourgeoise young man who fetishizes working-class idealism and can only write parodies of working-class life, such as poems about porter that happen to align perfectly with the student’s chosen hobbies. If At Swim-Two-Birds is an example of metafiction, in which a work of literature references its own status as a work of literature, then the student is a writer whose writing is about his anxieties as a person and a writer. He writes about himself in the same way that At Swim-Two-Birds is a novel about novels.

At the novel’s end, the student overcomes his laziness and graduates. He earns his uncle’s sincere congratulations and is genuinely shocked by his uncle’s sincerity. This shock makes the student doubt himself: If he cannot correctly judge his own uncle, he no longer believes himself capable of judging his own characters. He quickly resolves his novel without delivering a final judgment on Trellis, once more revealing how he embeds his own anxieties in his work. The student panics that he is a poor judge of character and so spares his created character from judgment. Trellis’s fate becomes the signal of the change that comes over the student. He is forced to confront his own limitations, and he accepts that he may not be as witty, insightful, or as appraising of character as he once imagined. As such, he admits defeat and finds an easy way to end his novel while paying greater respect to his uncle.

John Furriskey

John Furriskey arrives in the world a fully formed man and therefore lacks a past. Dermot Trellis creates Furriskey to play a role in one of the Western novels that Trellis writes. As such, he creates Furriskey with a specific personality set in stone. He is destined to be a violent thug and a womanizer, functioning as a minor antagonist in Trellis’s narrative. In this respect, Furriskey is entirely at Trellis’s mercy. Even though he doesn’t feel like a criminal and doesn’t want to commit crimes, he has no choice but to obey his creator’s instructions. The role of Furriskey in At Swim-Two-Birds is to illustrate how a person can struggle with their fate and free will in a seemingly predetermined universe. Furriskey wants to be his own man. He wants to settle down with his wife and live a normal, contented life. Trellis disagrees, so Furriskey is forced to go to war with an imagined idea of himself. He must fight for his right to exist on his own terms rather than at the mercy of his creator. John Furriskey is fighting for free will against the man who made him.

Part of Furriskey’s problem is his minor role in Trellis’s work. In a literary sense, Furriskey is unimportant. He is a violent criminal and a womanizer for whom any Lamont or Shanahan could substitute, rather than being unique in any specific way. Trellis creates Furriskey to serve a role in the novel, so Trellis relates to Furriskey as though he were a tool. Furriskey exists to a serve a purpose in the novel, and his wider desires and beliefs are as unimportant as the beliefs of a hammer or a nail. Similarly, Furriskey is a contemporary figure. He is a working-class man from Dublin rather than a figure of historic importance such as Finn Mac Cool or Mad Sweeny. However, Furriskey’s identity in this sense highlights the absurdity of Trellis’s power. Trellis wants to include Furriskey in a Western novel but makes him live in a hotel in Dublin. Furriskey isn’t a cowboy or an American; he's a mere substitute forced to act against his identity, even in the context of Trellis’s novel. Still, with Furriskey’s ill-fitting modernity comes a capacity for original thought. Furriskey arrives in the world devoid of experiences, so he doesn’t imagine the limitations that the older, more traditional characters feel. Furriskey knows that he’s in the wrong place and would rather be someone else, so he’s willing to do anything to defy the limitations that Trellis places on him. He helps to turn the tables on Trellis and trap Trellis in a new story.

Furriskey almost succeeds in reclaiming his agency from his creator and asserting his free will by placing his creator on trial. With the help of the other characters, Furriskey successfully demonstrates that free will is a real, tangible thing, and that it can be turned against those who wish to predetermine the fate of others. Furriskey’s existence becomes a commentary on the very nature of existence. He’s born without experiences but with memories, without free will but with a knowledge of his creator. Furriskey defies this status by creating new and untold experiences for himself and wresting back his free will from his master. Eventually, however, Furriskey fails because he lacks an understanding of the reality of his situation: He isn’t just a character in a novel; he’s a character in a novel within a novel. Trellis isn’t Furriskey’s creator; the student is the true creator, and by quickly finishing his novel without resolving the trial, the student denies Furriskey a true resolution. While Furriskey demonstrated his ability to reclaim his free will and assert his right to exist, he selected the wrong target. The nuanced and unexpectedly complex nature of reality is ultimately too much to overcome.

Dermot Trellis

Dermot Trellis is an unspectacularly skilled writer of Western pulp novels. Unlike the high-minded literature of the student—which Shanahan considers “fancy”—Trellis’s novels are simple, disposable, and somewhat forgettable. He is introduced to the audience as a man lacking in artistry and, as a creation of the student, he represents everything the student distrusts in literature. Trellis’s first crime is to be uninteresting, an original sin that justifies all the torture inflicted on him later in the novel. Furthermore, Trellis is unoriginal. He borrows and steals characters from other novels, populating his narratives with stock figures, stolen identities, and men like Furriskey, who are ill-suited to their roles as cowboys. Trellis doesn’t care. He creates his characters and then keeps a close eye on them by imprisoning them in the Red Swan Hotel. In a country with as rich a folklore tradition as Ireland, Trellis betrays his ancestry by writing frivolous novels about the American West that are so bad that his own characters rebel against him.

Not only is Trellis a bad writer, but he’s also a criminal. Beyond imprisoning his own creations and forcing them into roles against their will, he’s a rapist and a murderer. He invents a woman named Sheila to feature in one of his stories. Upon seeing her, however, he’s overcome with lust and immediately rapes her. Then, when she becomes pregnant, he kills her off during childbirth. Trellis’s dominion over his characters goes beyond any traditional employee/employer relationship, to the point that he feels that his characters are so unhuman that they are basically slaves in his ownership. He believes that he can do as he likes with them, whether that involves raping or killing them. The characters disagree. Trellis is a writer drunk on power. He revels in his authority and control over the characters, taking their lives and happiness for granted. He demonstrates a complete lack of empathy toward the people in his control. In this respect, his immoral control over his workers is a subtle commentary on the tensions between working-class people and their bourgeoise employers. Trellis’s behavior is so abhorrent that he makes himself a justifiable target for a workers’ (characters’) uprising.

The characters turn on him. They begin by forcing him to sleep, which allows them to live their lives as they please. However, forcing him into unconsciousness (where he cannot control them) isn’t enough. The pain and suffering that Trellis has inflicted on his characters is so traumatic that they decide to punish him. Orlick, the son of Sheila and Trellis, reveals to the other characters that he has inherited his father’s talent for writing. Together with the other characters, Orlick tortures Trellis and then places him on trial. Trellis is in danger of being tried for his sins by the people who have suffered most at his hand. He is saved at the last minute, however, when the student decides to rewrite the final part of his novel. His creator’s doubts save Trellis in a way that he would never have saved any of his own creations. The student’s doubts manifest in Trellis’s escape, as the student no longer trusts himself to judge any of his characters because he now believes that he has misjudged his own uncle. Trellis is saved by the kind of empathy that he lacks: He is saved by a creator viewing his own character as a human worthy of moral and fair treatment. The irony of the resolution of Trellis’s story is that his execution is stayed by an act of empathy that he could never perform himself. That Trellis survives without learning a lesson only makes him more reprehensible, allowing him to escape the consequences of his own lack of empathy thanks to his creator’s empathy.