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From McCabe to Jordan – Permutations of Themes and Narrative Discourses in The Butcher Boy

This paper sets out to examine narrative discourses and a variety of themes employed in Patrick McCabe's 1992 novel The Butcher Boy and Neil Jordan's 1997 big-screen adaptation of the novel. The first section of the paper analyses main features of the utterly “frenzied” narrative McCabe uses and how this narrative technique is linked to the thematic concerns of The Butcher Boy. It focuses on the gradual decline into madness of the main protagonist / unreliable narrator accompanied by the construction of various identities under the influence of a ubiquitous popular culture. The second part of the paper is concerned with the general nature of Jordan’s films and their protagonists and then attempts to demonstrate to what extent the Irish director succeeded in adapting McCabe’s astounding narrative discourse to the film. The aim of this analysis is to draw comparisons between the novel and the film and point out that the latter does not quite live up to McCabe’s original work.

The Butcher Boy; narration; madness; identity; popular culture; film

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