N a r r a t i v e8 7but it is certainly prudent for both mistress and reader to mistrust
his motives. Is he really distraught by the brevity of life and love, or
is he just trying to get her to sleep with him? Is this the most intel-
lectual attempt to bed a woman on human record? Is the speaker in
earnest in his musings about mortality, or is this simply an artful
device to persuade his mistress that she might as well indulge the
pleasures of the flesh while she still has some flesh to indulge? The
poem does not allow us to choose between these alternatives.
Instead, it allows them to co- exist in a kind of ironic tension,
playful and pressing at the same time. Maybe the narrator himself
has no idea of how serious he is intending to be.
There has been some argument among critics over whether
Thady Quirk, the narrator of Maria Edgeworth’s novel Castle
Rackrent, is an unreliable narrator or not. Thady is a servant of the
Irish aristocratic Rackrent family, and to all outward appearances a
faithful old retainer. He recounts the history of his drunken, black-
hearted employers with obsequious affection. Throughout the
book, he displays a genial indulgence of the vices of his superiors,
which include such endearing little foibles as Sir Kit Rackrent
imprisoning his wife in her bedroom for seven years. One can thus
read the novel as a satire of the way servants can be conned into
complicity with their masters, a complicity which is more in their
masters’ interests than their own. In this sense, the novel is a fable
of misplaced loyalties.
Yet this is not the only reading possible. We can also see Thady
as a type of the rebellious Irish peasantry, craftily concealing his
disaffection beneath a mask of servility. Perhaps he is secretly
working for the overthrow of the landlords, and thus seeking to
promote the old Gaelic dream of the common people reclaiming
the land. There are clues in the novel to suggest such a scheme.