O p e n i n g s3 9I killed old Phillip Mathers’. ‘Not everybody’ suggests that more
than just a few people do, which implies that the murder is to some
extent public knowledge.
What the narrator moves on to is the business of excusing
himself. No sooner has he confessed to smashing in Mathers’s jaw
than he is busy trying to pin the blame on Divney, who supposedly
struck the first blow and who was ‘personally responsible for the
whole idea in the first place’. It is as though the narrator, who
remains nameless throughout the story, is hoping that by the time
we have read our way from ‘It was he who told me to bring my
spade’ to ‘the explanations when they were called for’, we will have
forgotten that he has just branded himself as a murderer. There is
something darkly comic about this about- turn, as there is about the
feeble stab at self- justification of ‘It was he who told me to bring my
spade.’ It is hard to imagine a jury being swayed to clemency by this
information. There is also something funny about the vagueness
of the phrase ‘and also the explanations when they were called
for’. What explanations? Explanations to the narrator about why
they were murdering Mathers (did he not know this already?),
or explanations of how the operation should be carried out, or
explanations ready to hand should the deed be discovered?
Absurdity is a familiar Irish literary mode, and there is plenty of
it in these stark sentences. Why does Divney kill old Mathers with
a bicycle pump, of all improbable weapons? (The novel is obsessed
with bicycles.) How easy would it be to fashion a bicycle- pump out
of a hollow iron bar, and why should Divney do so in the first
place? The bicycle was a common mode of transport in the Ireland
of the time, so there should have been no shortage of pumps. The
narrator surely cannot mean that Divney turned the bar into a
bicycle- pump for the express purpose of belabouring Mathers with