Brian Moore's short storiesan instance of advancing recurrent autobiographic subject matter

Resumo

As Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian's Memoirs reminds us, life, together with readings, are two of the essential muses of every writer. Parallel to this, we can readily assume the frequent fact that the author’s biographic background is more directly employed in their early literature production than afterwards. Our aim here is to illustrate these assumptions by depicting two short stories and expressing some personal views on the ways of the author, Brian Moore (1921- 1999), one of the most prolific and celebrated contemporary novelists from Ulster. The analysis of “Grieve for the Dear Departed” (1959) and “Uncle T” (1960) will not only reveal the distinct presence of Moore’s personal past, but also anticipate all his persistent and typically Irish narrative motifs. If most of his work is devoted to evince his own exile through a struggle to integrate the outsider’s obsessions with memory and the acceptance of his new wandering identity, we can also notice how this goal is framed by invigorating a series of intimate preoccupations already present in the referred stories.