Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy (1992)

abuse doled out to Francie by his parents contrast sharply with the meticulous
upbringing and private school education provided to Philip by his. Even Philip's
comic books - which are "neatly filed away in shirt boxes not a crease or a dog-ear
in sight" and which look as if "they had come straight out of the shop" (3) - seem
to express the bourgeois order, pride, and respectability upheld by the family at
large. All of this contributes to the opposition in Francie's (and in the reader's)
mind between the Nugent adobe of domestic order and harmony and the Brady one of
domestic chaos and dysfunction.
In contrast to a statement that Francie imagines Philip to make, "I love my
mother more than anything in the world and I'd never do anything in the world to
hurt her. I love my parents and I love my happy home," Francie imagines that people
think of him, "I hope he's proud of himself now, the pig, after what he did on his
poor mother" (47). That the Bradys come to be "pigs" in the town's (and in his own)
mind Francie blames directly on the Nugents. The label of "pigs" that attaches to
the Bradys is also related in Francie's thinking to the disparity between the
Nugent and Brady homes and to the fact that he both idealizes and demonizes the
Nugents: that he wishes to be like them yet regrads their evident superiority as a
rebuke to Brady honor, and so comes to resent them deeply.
Francie blames Mrs Nugent for inaugurating the use of the expression "pigs"
to describe his family. As Francie sees it, Mrs Nugent is the one who

started on about the pigs. She said she knew the kind of us long before she went to
England and she might have known not to let her son anywhere near the likes of me
what else would you expect from a house where the father's never in, lying about
the pubs from morning to night, he's no better than a pig.(4)

Most of the disparaging comments about the Bradys that Francie imagines Mrs Nugent
to be making are revealed to be projections of Francie's own guilty fears about his
family and the role he plays in its disintegration.
Francie's solution to his imagined sense of persecution at the hands of Mrs
Nugent and Philip is to bait, harass, and violently assault them. His first hostile
act is to institude a mock "pig toll tax" that he attemps to extract from Mrs
Nugent and Philip as they pass him on the sidewalk. He ceases his harassment only
when he perceives "a tear" in Mrs Nugent's eye (13). His next move is to invite
Philip to play with him in his hideaway, a chicken house, where he assults him
violently. Philip is recused by the fortuitous arrival of Joe. Later, Francie
attempts to barge into the Nugent home, struggles with Mrs Nugent and Philip in the
doorway, and agress to leave only when Philip looks at Francie with "them sad
eyes"54 - a mirror of his own sad eyes.

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