On Christmas Morning
Uploaded by MarkHill on Oct 08, 2001
Task: Frank O'Connor stories often appear in anthologies of short stories because they are regarded as good stories. Choose one story by Frank O'Connor which you feel should be included in an anthology. Fully explain why you think this text deserves inclusion in a collection of short stories.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading "On Christmas Morning" by Frank O'Connor as it covers many different themes. In this essay I will look at what makes it good in order to show that the story deserves inclusion in an anthology of good stories.
The story is based on the childhood of a young Irish boy called Larry. The first thing we learn from the story is that he is the eldest of two brothers and that he doesn't like his brother Sonny.
Larry does not pay much attention at school and would rather be out playing with his friends he says "for the life of me I couldn't see what attracted mother to education". Larry's relationship with Sonny is pretty poor. Sonny is good at his books and his mother's favourite because of this. Larry thinks that rather than try to be smarter than Sonny and fail he just won't try at all, we see this when Larry says "it wasn't my fault if, four days before the holidays, Flogger Dawley gave us sums we couldn't do, and Peter Doherty and myself had to go on the lang". As the story goes on we see the mischievous Larry develop into a more deceitful person. Larry hangs about with the Doherty gang and his mother isn't very pleased with this "can't you do your lessons first and play after?" She would say. The piece of evidence which shows us Larry developing into a deceitful person the most is when he swops presents with Sonny because he feels he got the better present. He assures himself he is doing Sonny a good turn and that Sonny would have no use for a popgun and would much rather prefer a picture book. Larry says to himself "Sonny would never be any good in a gang: he was fond of spelling, and a studious child like him could learn a lot of spellings from a book like mine." Larry believes Santa is real contrary to what the Dohertys' say but when him and Sonny take their presents to show their mum and dad "mother smiled, but only...