The Butcher Boy

Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy is a story about a schizophrenic boy whose condition steadily worsens as the story progresses. McCabe mirrors his style of writing with the state of his protagonist, Francie’s, condition. As Francie worsens in the story McCabe’s style becomes more disjointed and somewhat spastic. Though the story begins with little use of punctuation and run-on and fragmented sentences, this becomes more and more common as the novel goes on. 
  
The mirroring of Francie’s condition in the style of writing is reminiscent of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. At the beginning of “Portrait” Joyce begins by showing his protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, as a small child. He is able to accurately show this character as a child through the style of his writing. The writing is very basic, lacking complex details and consisting mainly of short, straightforward sentences. Joyce even includes several rhymes that one would imagine to be playing through a child’s head. 
  
As “Portrait” progresses and Stephen matures the style of writing matures with him, growing more complex and showing that more thought is going into his actions and words than when he was a child. The words Joyce uses seem to say that more thought went into that part of the writing than the previous part. This continues all the way through the end of the novel. 
  
With McCabe, as stated before he also uses his writing to mirror his character’s state of mind. As Joyce’s Stephen continually increases in intellectual capacity thus does Francie decrease. By the end of the novel it becomes difficult to distinguish between separate events as well as discern which characters remain real people that Francie is interacting with and which ones he has created for himself. Though a single thought may be followed from one scene to the next and one conversation to another, such as the pig concept, it is not always clear what connection Francie makes between situations. It is uncertain what led him to lash out at a character about a topic that he previously had been talking genially with about the same topic. 
  
By jumping from scene to scene with nothing but a small break in the text, McCabe is able to portray the disconnectedness that exists inside Francie’s mind and accurately show how Francie is seeing the world and how he is making connections, though the reader may not be able to see them himself. McCabe is able to achieve a confused, spastic feel in his reader with his writing style, allowing the reader to more closely relate to Francie.