The Hard Life, Flann O'Brien’s fourth novel, is,very much like his prose, difficult to be categorized. Generally and simplistically defined as an all-Irish example of Bildungsroman, the novel is striking for the presentation of an environment in which comic transgressions seek to invalidate the social occasions on which the protagonist finds himself. While the conventions of the genre itself invoke a possible but distant progression and acquired maturity for the ‘unhero’, a story of failure and despair, an “exegesis of squalor” takes over, with attacks to the Roman Catholic Church and the education received at its schools as a constant motif. The aim of my contribution would be to analyse the way in which language is used as a source of humour to give voice to the story of an orphaned distanced narrator named Finbarr and evaluate how the text draws inspiration and distances itself from another canonical Irish Bildungroman, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man.
