Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy (1992)

on his way, "you've got so tall! I'm glad things have worked out for you" (111).
Still later Father Dom runs into Francie carrying home stout, and is too easily
convinced that the stout is for Francie's "da" (it is really for himself, his
father now being deceased) and that he therefore need not be concerned (129).
Martin McLoone broadens this point to include Catholic society at large: Francie's
psychosis is for him in part "the product of the narrow Catholic society" into
which he is born, a culture "river by poverty, complacency, hypocrisy and
neglect."47
Francie's second experience of incarceration is in a mental hospital - local
asylum that was "previously the site of his mother's incarceration for mental
illness" 48 - after the discovery of his father's decaying corpse in the family
parlor. Francie's response to this incarceration is to reduce "the process of
medication, rehabilitation, and recovery to a game."49 This time it is not the
Church but the medical community that is held up to scrutiny. Doctor Roche, who
looks not at you but " right through you" (119), and the medical community at large
are shown as failing to see Francie's problems for what they are and as proposing
superficial bureaucratic solutions. The medicos in the asylum put Francie "in big
chair with this helmet on [his] head and wires coming out all over the place" in
order to perform experiments. At another time Francie describes an army of "starchy
bastards of students with clipboards gawking at you I hope he doesn't leap up out
of the chair and chop us up !" (157), a description that both presages Francie's
butchery of Mrs Nugent and reveals the extent to which the doctors, like Francie's
neighbors, exploit his suffering and freakishness for the purposes of gossip and
entertainment value. The medicos give Francie tablets, have him weave baskets, and
show him Rorschach blots ("they'd take me down to the room and hand me bits of
paper all blotted with ink. What do you think about that says the doc. You won't be
writing any more messages on that paper I says... Its destroyed I says, look at it"
[164-5]), as if such therapies can identify, much less solve, his myriad problems.
Upon being released from the hospital Francie runs into the homeless "drunk lad"
who frequents the Tower, but who now will have nothing to do with him (205) ( both
this drunk lad and the stray dog Grouse Armstrong function as versions of Francie,
as means of commenting on his social standing). Such rejection- by his family and
society at large - only encourages Francie's violent feelings for Mrs Nugent.
It is for this murder that Francie is incarcerated a final time, in a prison
for the criminally insane, "another house of a hundred windows" (229). Solitary
confinement is an ironis treatment for one driven to violent acts by rejection and
isolation ( "How can your solitary [confinement ever] finish?" Francie asks;
"That's the best laugh yet" [230] ). It is from this prison hospital that Francie
narrates, retrospectively, the novel we read.

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