1. Context
1.1. John McGahern was born in 1934 in Dublin, Ireland. He grew up in the northwest part of the country with his six younger siblings. His cherished mother died from cancer when he was only nine, this is why he and his siblings had to live with their bestial father who was a police sergeant. When McGahern grew up, he took classes in the University College of Dublin and began to write short stories while teaching at school.
1.2. John McGahern is known for his representations of Irish men and women restricted and damaged by the convections of their homeland. He talks about the Irish society and the human heart in his stories. In "The Stoat", McGahern in a way also conveys the life he lived with his father in the barracks.
2. Structure
2.1. Characters
2.1.1. The boy
2.1.1.1. He is studying to become a doctor, although his father wants him to be a banker. We can see that he has a distant relationship with him. His mother has died and he doesn't want his father to remarry. He also learn that he has a close relationship with his uncle and wants to move with him.
2.1.2. The father
2.1.2.1. A fifty-two-year-old widower. He is the principle of a school but the story gives us the impression he doesn't like his job. He lost his wife several years ago and is now looking for companionship so he puts an ad to find a woman. He has high standards in women and seeks for his son's approval.
2.1.3. The uncle
2.1.3.1. Has a very close relationship with the boy. The fact that the boy chooses to pursue the same college career than his uncle instead of following his father desires, shows how close these two characters were. Despite this, the uncle doesn't feel empathy for his brother. He mocks him for wanting a companion. He doesn't have a good relation with his brother and seems somewhat arrogant.
2.1.4. Miss McCabe
2.1.4.1. She is a single woman who is also looking for a partner. She seeks the protagonist's father when she sees the ad. They were going to get together, just when she suffers a heart attack. This provokes the father to no longer want to be with her and abandones her without an explanation.
2.2. Summary
2.2.1. The story is set near Strandhill, a coastal village in Ireland, where a son and widowed father are on vacation. While the son is golfing, he hears a rabbit dying since a stoat has persecuted him. The boy kills the rabbit to stop his suffering and takes it with him to his father. The father doesn't think their guest, Miss McCabe, will like the rabbit. Then, the boy has a flashback of how his father asked him for approval to remarry and sent an ad to women who wanted companionship as well.
2.2.2. We now learn that the son is planning on moving out with his uncle, whom with he has a better relationship. Moving to the dinner with Miss McCabe, unexpectedly the son ended up approving the marriage and liking her. They were all very excited for the wedding but the next day, Miss McCabe suffer a heart attack which changes the father's perspective on her.
2.2.3. Immediately after the heart attack, the father decides to abandon Miss McCabe without any explanations since he didn't want to suffer the loss of another woman in his life. The son finally left his father to go live with his uncle. The story ends with an allegory of life: the stoat kills the rabbit. The stoat represents death while the rabbit represents people running away from it. You can try to escape death but it will always be behind you until it gets you eventually.
3. Rhetorical question
3.1. The father is portrayed as a selfish person because of the way he left Miss McCabe.
3.2. “Who wants to marry a woman who can pop off at any minute?”
3.3. We are able to recognize how the writer used a rhetorical question to emphasize the selfishness and lack of responsibility of the father. He left Miss McCabe only because she had a heart attack. He didn’t even try to talk to her, he just chose to leave without working things out. This demonstrated us how the father only cared about his feelings and didn’t even think about how Miss McCabe would feel when she found out he had left her. On another hand, he may have had his reasons to commit such actions. He had already buried his first wife, and I’m sure he wasn’t looking forward to doing it with a second one. So, when Miss McCabe had the heart attack it showed him that she might have health issues which could lead to a short life. Although this might be true, it is no excuse for the father’s actions. He could’ve been honest with Miss McCabe and told her the truth of why he was leaving, not just abandoning her.
3.4. The reader might feel pity for Miss McCabe since she was dumped by the father in such hard circumstances. The reader might also have a feeling of rejection towards the father because of how egotistical he was conveyed.
4. Metaphor
4.1. McGahern demonstrates how the father aims for perfection in a woman and won’t settle for anything less.
4.2. “No matter how fast the rabbit raced, the stoat was still on its trail, and at last the rabbit sat down in terror and waited for the stoat to slither up and cut the vein behind the ear."
4.3. We can observe how the author used a metaphor to show how the father, portrayed as the stoat, seeks perfection in women which drives him to ending up alone, which is very ironic. The stoat spent a lot of time chasing the rabbit to eat it but in the end the son took the rabbit from him, so the stoat didn’t get what he wanted, since he slithered away just like the father. The rabbit is a metaphor for Miss McCabe and the son finding the rabbit is a metaphor for the father’s requirements in a woman. The father desired a woman so much, just like the stoat craved the rabbit, but in the end his own actions and desires drove him to loneliness and not getting what he wanted. His high expectations in women ended up backfiring at him and leaving him alone without a wife, which was what he desired in the first place.
4.4. The reader might feel mournful and sorry for the father for not getting a wife which was his biggest wish after his first wife died.
5. Themes
5.1. Death
5.1.1. The symbol of the stoat chasing the rabbit emphasizes the inescapability of death. "All night the rabbit must have raced from warren to warren, the stoat on its trail". Symbolism is used in this quote to portray how humans are afraid of death. The rabbit represents the humans who believe they can get away from death, just as the rabbit runs away from the stoat which symbolizes death.The truth is that death is inevitable and everyone must go through it at some point in their life.
5.1.2. Death is the reason why the narrator's father abandones Miss McCabe."Miss McCabe had suffered a heart attack". This is a declarative sentence. It states that Miss McCabe is having health issues which brings her closer to death. This is why the father decides to leave her, since he is afraid of burying another wife of his. Miss McCabe suffered this threat of death which caused the father to completely abandon their relationship.
5.2. Companionship
5.2.1. The father is preoccupied with seeking a companion in order to not feel lonely as he ages, since his last wife had past away. "I’ll have to eke out my days between this empty house and the school." This quote demonstrates us how the father fears he is going to have a lonely life since his son is going away to college. The father feels like he is lacking companionship at this point in his life.
5.2.2. What the father wants most in these hard times is a partner. "At my age you don’t expect much from marriage, but at least I’d have companionship.” In this quote highlighted by alliteration, we can see how the father doesn't expect this partner to love him nor desires a passionate relationship, he just expects her to keep him company. He just wants a companion to spend some time with and don't feel alone. At this point in his life, he no longer desires a romantic love affair, he really just seeks companionship with anybody.