CLASSIFICATION. “You are right,” says Mr. O’Brien, “about ‘The Whale
and the Grasshopper.’ It is a sort of fable and like the other sketches
in my book it was written for the sake of the philosophy and humor. The
starting point of the narrative was the remark of Padna Dan ‘As the
Whale said to the Grasshopper,’ which I considered a good title, and
accordingly wrote the phantasy.”
Read as a sort of parallel, Emerson’s “The Mountain and the Squirrel.”
What is the difference in the mental attitude of the two authors?
SETTING. Why is such a fable particularly well set near Castlegregory
on a June morning? Note the intensifying of the setting by means of
dialect. Would the place be realized without the Irish speech? Study
the selective processes used to make the dialect easy to understand and
yet distinctly characteristic of the Green Isle.
CHARACTERS. Standish McNeill and Felix O’Dowd seem to be real
people,--at the very beginning, because of their names. The writer
who is less careful would have endowed them with Mike or Pat. How are
they kept up from start to finish as real? Why, for example, do you
know they took that walk? What characteristic (at once Celtic and
individual) of Standish enables him to “put across” so vividly a yarn
which one _knows_ all along can be only fable?
GENERAL METHODS. Mr. O’Brien states that he does not know how much he
believes in or practices technical distinctions. “Writing, I think, is
the art that must evolve out of ourselves. I began life as an artist
and specialized in sculpture, but finding there were things I could not
express through such a medium I took to writing. When I am impressed
by some important event, it fashions itself in story or drama form
in my mind, without any conscious effort on my part, and when I feel
intelligent--which is not often--I write.”