Dublin Carol Book

Scattered First Thoughts:

This is the third McPherson I've read (after Shining City and Port Authority), and while they differ notably in structure and genre, they're all preoccupied with guilt.

I had the intuition that there's something particularly Catholic about how McPherson figures guilt, and it got me thinking about the difference between guilt and regret.

The noun form of guilt (gylt meaning sin/crime) predates the verb, whereas with regret the inverse is true. Guilt seems to imply an external moral/legal standard, while regret is emotional, a pain caused by the immutability of the past.

(Maybe this distinction is obvious to a lot of people, but I definitely conflate feeling guilty with feeling regret.)

For Catholics, confessing your guilt is paramount and only through confession of guilt is redemption possible. So there's an association between guilt and redemption. By this logic, feeling guilty isn't merely a corrosive, obsessive force (like regret can be).

McPheron isn't Catholic as far as I can tell, but he asks a lapsed Catholic's questions: can guilt be a catalyst for personal change? What might secular redemption look like? Is it distinct from being forgiven? How?

McPherson's characters often seem to be enacting variants of confession (Port Authority is all monologues, Shining City deals with a therapist/patient relationship), and John in this play is exemplary of that. For McPherson's guilty parties, confession itself seems unequivocally positive, even if McPherson is ambivalent about the possibility of redemption.