The man who invented sin

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Ballyshannon, photo from Donegal (Ireland)

The man who invented the sin (in the original The Man Who Invented Sin , 1980 translated by Elisabeth Schnack is) a short story by Irish writer Seán O'Faolain , the first time in 1947 in the collection Teresa and Other Stories at London Jonathan Cape Publishing has been published. The German translation of this short story by Elisabeth Schnack first appeared in the Lügner und Lovers collection at Diogenes Verlag .

The first-person narrator describes in retrospect his youthful experiences during a holiday camp in July 1920 in the mountains in the Gaelic-speaking part of Ireland, the so-called "Free Country" , where English- speaking city dwellers were to be familiarized with the Celtic language and culture .

The focus of the narrator's descriptions are the various consequences of the meeting of six people. The central issue is the conflict between the self-determination of individual action and the restriction by the authority of the Irish Catholic Church.

The harmless leisure activities of the narrator and a group of four clergy turned into sinful activity with lasting consequences for those affected by the intervention of the local pastor. In the narrative presence in the final part of the short story , the man who invented sin finally turns out to be the story of a depressing disillusionment on the part of the narrator.

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In the initial situation of the story, during the holiday course in the Gaeltacht in the summer of 1920, the narrator shares an accommodation in a farmhouse with two nuns and two monks . Despite the initially cool distance and differences, the five unequal guests, the fun-loving sister Magdalen, the morally strict sister Chrysostom, the peasant brother Virgilius, the intellectual brother Majellan and the youthfully exuberant narrator spend a lot of time together and come together by learning the Irish language together Language and the sharing of childhood memories soon come closer. You will experience fun evenings together with singing, dancing and games. Although these evening amusements are completely harmless, rumors soon reach the plump village vicar , who is taking up his first pastor's position in the village and is called by everyone contemptuously "Lispeen", which means "frog".

The pastor then entered the house of the five with a considerable din, insulted them and assumed that they were indecent in an inflated and arrogant manner. Although the five friends were previously unreflective and of course not aware of any immoral acts or intentions, the pastor's lecture now has the exact opposite effect: It is precisely because of the attraction of the forbidden that they now have all the more fun in their evening entertainment, which they enjoy despite the intervention of the vicar to continue and even increase. They organize nocturnal concerts in the garden, receive visits from friends from the area, take part in a boat party on the nearby lake and their night's sleep is consequently postponed further and further.

On the last evening the hustle and bustle of the five friends reaches its dramatic climax: the clergy and the narrator take part in a cheerful boat trip late in the evening until well after midnight. After their return, however, the angry village priest awaits them on the bank. While the other participants of the journey are still talking to the vicar, the two nuns and monks, after several unsuccessful attempts to escape him, can finally dress up on the boat and sneak past Lispeen unnoticed. However, one of the sisters loses her guimpe , i. H. the nun's veil, which remains at the dock as an incriminating corpus delicti .

The pastor finds this piece of evidence and intends to report the offensive activities of the four clergy to higher ecclesiastical offices. However, the narrator uses a trick to save his friends from further inconvenience. That same night he had the vicar called to a sick person with a simulated emergency call and in the meantime stole the evidence from his house.

Since the participation in the boat celebration can no longer be proven for the two nuns and monks, the clergy seem to get off lightly. Outwardly everything seems to be "in order" again for the time being: The four clergymen leave the next day without fear of reprisals from the higher church authorities; However, the narrator does not see the two nuns and brother Virgilius again afterwards and does not hear from them again.

As the narrator found out by chance more than twenty years later, however, “Lispeen” turned out to be the unqualified winner of that summer: The horror of last evening and the guilty conscience afterwards haunted the four members of the order throughout their lives. When the narrator unexpectedly meets Brother Majellan again in town in 1943, the once euphoric and critical intellectual , who was the only one who dared to criticize the vicar's demeanor, turned into a broken, resigned old man who defied his resistance against the has long since given up church authorities.

This oppressive and frightening experience of the narrator is reinforced at the end of the story when, a few hours later, he runs into Lispeen again in front of a bookstore. While Majellan now appears at the meeting in 1943 as an emaciated figure in a stooped, submissive posture, only to return to his monastery in the slums of the city afterwards, Lispeen has hardly changed, apart from his slightly gray hair (text p. 59) . In complete contrast to Majellan, he remembers the summer of 1920 only vaguely and vaguely ( “It was not easy to remind him of those distant years” , p. 59).

While Majellan is completely broken by Lispeen's influence, Lispeen shows himself with his top hat and umbrella with a silver crutch in an unchanged upright position and greets the narrator happily like a best friend from the old days; the setting sun symbolically reinforces this impression by illuminating his rosy face and the sides of his top hat so that they glow and shine (p. 59). Laughing, he reveals to the narrator that his outrage at the time was only feigned: “'Oh, you know,' he confided to me with shining eyes, 'they were the purest children! Such innocent lambs! 'He laughed at the thought of the innocent souls. > Of course, had I scare them a fright! ' " (P 60).

General meaning of the story

The focus of the story is the experience of the conflict between the individual and society , more precisely the individual reaction to the environment and to authoritarian structures, here in the form of the village pastor Lispeen, through the first-person narrator. As Kosok points out in his analysis of the short story, the “trick” of temporal spacing contributes to this “by introducing a final section [sic] that takes place much later. Although the narrator remains nameless and largely in the background, he is the real central figure because he gains the insight that remains closed to the rest and also passes this on to the reader. ”The narrator reports on the events of his youth with a distance of one aging man after meeting the two main characters again twenty-three years later. Quite incidentally, the “we” of the main part becomes the “I” of the final part; As the change in the personal pronoun shows, the former community of the holiday course has been destroyed.

Brother Majellan has heard nothing more from the two nuns and also knows little about Brother Vigilius; Since then he has never returned to the mountains, but in one respect he agrees with the narrator: "The mountains are lonely" (p. 58, in the English original it says: "empty" ) Much has changed during the past twenty-three Years changed; the real shock for the narrator, however, is not the change in Majellan's external appearance ( "he had turned gray and was a little crooked and was much leaner" , p. 58). Much more significant for him is the change in Majellan's attitudes : “'Oh, you know,' he said after a moment's thought, 'I don't think I completely approve of the young people there [d. H. to go to Gaeltacht in the mountains]. I hope I don't seem prudish or anything like that, but… well, you know how it goes there! ”” (P. 58).

Majellan is no longer the enthusiastic , idealistic intellectual who stands up for his own independent beliefs; the stooped stance already indicates that he has long since given up his critical stance and submitted to the ecclesiastical authorities . As Kosok writes, he has "degenerated into a suspicious, insecure old man without any influence." It is true that only the narrator sees this, not Majellan himself; the separation from the childhood friend reflected in this is an extremely painful experience for the aging narrator at this point.

Lispen's intervention at the time did not fail to have an effect, Majellan has returned to the correct path from the perspective of the church. The narrator, however, sees this path as wrong; the intervention of the village vicar can even be interpreted as diabolical from his point of view . He associates Lispeen with the serpent in the Bible and the four clergy with the inhabitants of the Garden of Eden , who are forbidden to eat the apple from the tree of knowledge . He comments on Lispeen's intervention with the following words: "The snake came into the garden with the most insidious of all temptations." (P. 54)

In contrast to the other four clergymen, Lispeen is still doing well. His top hat and umbrella with a silver crutch emphasize his wealth; Even in 1943 he showed himself to the narrator as a respectable authority who was greeted with respect by everyone and whose power was still unbroken. That summer of 1920 was completely meaningless to him; ironically , as he openly states, his current moral indignation was only theatrical ; However, he doesn't even have the slightest remorse about it.

Minor characters

Sister Magdalen is described as "little" in the story; she is " so graceful and cheerful and effervescent [...] that it seemed a shame to withdraw her from the world and lock her in a monastery" (p. 44). She comes from the upper urban middle class, her father was a doctor (p. 46 and p. 49). She has difficulties learning the Irish language, especially the pronunciation of Gaelic words (pp. 45ff.). Strikingly, its character is already indicated by the name. The village curate it raises "very dignified and quite superior" as "Sister Maria Magdalena" before, after which the priest replied resentfully: "A very apt name!" . Mary Magdalene is regarded in the New Testament as confidante of Jesus Christ , who spreads his message after his crucifixion ; on the other hand, in the later tradition she was equated with the foot-washing sinner from ( Lk 7.36-50  EU ) and thus the archetype of the “holy sinner”. In O'Faolain's short story, she is the one who sins like the others, but has fewer moral concerns and is less plagued by a guilty conscience.

Sister Chrysostom , on the other hand, embodies the religious sister who believes in authority and is oriented towards higher authorities . Like Virgilius, she reproaches Majellan for revolting against the vicar: “[S] you knew what an impression it would make in the city where the bishop lived and her superiors would say: 'What is it? Nuns and monks live in the same house? And dance together And sing songs? ‹” (P. 53). She differs from Sister Magdalen not only in her external appearance: "Sister Chrysostom was tall, [...] she had big hands and a pimply skin [...] she was a bit stiff in nature" (p. 44). Her moral trait is also suggested by her name. Chrysostom goes back to the Greek word "chrysostomos" , which means "golden mouth". She ensures that the evenings end early and is the one who repeatedly expresses her moral concerns (see e.g. BS 46 or p. 50). Despite her “warnings and fears” (p. 54), which are hardly heeded by the others, she cannot resist the temptation and, like the others, takes part in the nocturnal goings-on.

Brother Virgilius is “a farmer's son of powerful build and powerful voice; he had red, round cheeks and nerves like ropes ” (p. 44). The narrator is unclear why he wanted to become a monk; as the narrator believes, "[he] is much better suited to be a farmer than a teacher" (p. 44). Virgilius is a simple man of the country and is already familiar with the Irish language. In this way, he helps the two women with the correct pronunciation of Gaelic and is also able to translate an Irish song (see p. 45f.). While Majellan's intelligence and sensitivity are emphasized, Brother Virgilius emphasizes the simplicity and naturalness of his being; unlike Majellan, he is more easily intimidated by the vicar's authority.

Linguistic and symbolic means

As Kosok points out in his analysis of the story, the description of the landscape in the beginning of the story shows the image of a "Garden of Eden, in which" ideas of pre-Christian Ireland are mixed with features of a Christian paradise free from sin . Humans and nature live in harmony. On the day when the guests get closer, nature also changes: “I remember” , reports the narrator, “how the fog slices rose from the mountain valleys in the afternoon and how the sun caressed the rocks with gentle haze and the Trout jumped up in a lake that was blue like the scrap of blue sky between the fading clouds. ” (P. 47) The four clergymen are sketched as the childlike innocent inhabitants of this paradise, they speak with “ childlike enthusiasm ” (p. 48) and blush when they are supposed to translate a love poem (p. 50) and are “more astonished than angry” even in an argument . Like children who ran into a door " (p. 50)"

This innocent childlike joy and harmony is destroyed by the Lispeen appearing with a "thunderous roar", whose appearance consistently bears traits of a satanic figure from the superstition of the people. For example, when he leaves, the five friends see “his shadow pass before the fading shine of the lake” (p. 53) and the narrator associates him, as already mentioned above, with a “deceitful snake” (p. 54). In the final part of the story, the narrator reports that every time Lispeen is greeted by people, " his elongated shadow behind him [wagged] like a tail" (p. 60). On the last evening before departure, after the horror following the boat party, autumn symbolically announces itself in the river mists: “Dew and fog enveloped the quiet house on all sides. The lake looked chilly; the sky was pale. " (p. 58)

The narrative is characterized by an extraordinary form of condensation ; at the beginning a few sentences are sufficient to characterize the four clergymen and to explain to the reader and the like. a. through the change in personal pronouns from “I” to “we” already mentioned, to illustrate how a community develops out of four individuals.

The narrative perspective changes in the first part between an epic -summarischen representation of flashback to the year 1920 and a dialogic form of presentation that not only the credibility and authenticity increases the memories of the narrator, but also the immediacy and dramatic effect on the reader increases, who in this way himself becomes an eyewitness or observer of the events.

Another linguistic feature of this short story is the use of Gaelic expressions at various points in the narrative, which intensifies the creation of the local color , for example when the five participants in the holiday course are doing their homework or practicing the pronunciation of Gaelic words or an old Irish folk song sing (p. 47ff.). The name Lispeen is also of Gaelic origin, cf. “[…] We called him in Irish 'Lispeen', which means frog” (p. 51).

Political importance

Dublin after the 1916 Easter Rising

The Man Who Invented Sin not only deals with the fate of some individuals on a general level of meaning, but also outlines, as Kosok points out, two important stages in the history of Ireland. The narrator dates the holiday course in the early part of the story precisely to the year 1920. In this year the Easter Rising , initially supported mainly by nationalists, turned into a struggle for independence that was supported by the majority of the people. England sent the notorious Black and Tans to help the pro-British police force to fight the resistance . Their brutal approach, however, tended to strengthen the Irish resistance. The basis for the uprising of the Irish was the return to the pre-British cultural tradition of the country, which had been preserved in the Gaeltacht despite the centuries-long history of occupation of the country and found its clear expression in the Gaelic language, which was still alive there.

With the description of the attempt by large urban segments of the population to learn Irish, O'Faolain sets a decidedly political accent in his short story. He refers z. When describing the accommodation, for example, reference was made to the expulsion of the ruling pro-British upper class, the Protestant Ascendancy , and the support of the common people for the goal of an independent Ireland: “The monks and nuns bought empty mansions, which after the revolution from the owners had been abandoned. And the miners ceded their best rooms to the rest of us. ” (P. 43) The re-encounter between urban and rural populations is also reflected in the contrast between Sister Magdalen, the “ city dweller ” (p. 46) and brother Virgilius, the “ farmer's son “ (P. 44); the evening discussions express the widespread sympathy for the future of Ireland: "And already you were in the middle of a heated discussion, as we always had in those days, for example whether Ireland should always remain an agricultural country ..." (p. 46 ). The idealism of this time can also be seen in the behavior of the course participants, whose newfound freedom not only leads to political independence, but also to a new tolerance for a harmonious coexistence of ways of life that until then appeared incompatible in Ireland: “If you go up into the Mountains rose, in order to bathe naked in a tiny little lake, one could suddenly see a line of young students tumbling down laughing like alpinists from the nearest rock shoulder; or you could lean arm in arm with your loved one around a ledge on a deserted mountain pass and burst into the midst of a crowd of young nuns who sang chorales with dignity between the rocks ... ” (p. 43) The threat to this attitude comes at the end of the course when Sister Magdalen commented on Virgilius' anticipation of the next summer course with the words: "If there are any summer courses next year" (p. 55).

In fact, according to Kosok, the height of the enthusiastic national movement was reached in 1920. After the armistice in the following year and the subsequent treaty negotiations with England , which led to the devastating civil war of 1922/23 , the idealistic idea of ​​the newly won freedoms was completely destroyed. In the short story, this is symbolically reflected in the changed image of the otherwise harmonious nature and landscape: “Then the gray mountain swelled like a ghost in front of the spreading moonlight, and the whole country became black and white. […] It got cold on the water. ” (P. 56).

The final part of the story, precisely dated in 1943, indicates the further historical effects of this development. By war neutrality of Ireland whose economic, political and cultural was isolation intensified; the petty bourgeoisie had become the ruling class in the state without adopting the cultural tradition of the Protestant Ascendancy ; however, all significant decisions were made by the Catholic Church, likewise without reference to cultural tradition. As Kosok writes, there was “hardly imaginable provincialism ; Intolerance, prudery and distrust in all walks of life, the ruthless suppression of all non-adaptation Prepare and a state institutionalized literary censorship that several of O'Faolains works such as the books banned nearly all respected writers in the country. "This atmosphere found in The Man Who Invented Sin expression in the description of the narrator's re-encounter with Brother Virgilius and Pastor Lispeen. From O'Faolain's point of view, the goals of the struggle for independence have been perverted by the “predominance of intolerance, narrow-minded morality and clerical tutelage”. The sentence in the story: "The mountains are lonely" (p. 58) points to the end of the Gaeltacht , which has now been depopulated through rural exodus and emigration .

Autobiographical background

Sean O'Faolain himself took part in various summer courses in the Gaeltacht in his youth in order to familiarize himself with the Irish language and culture. Various biographers and interpreters of The Man Who Invented Sin refer to the clear autobiographical background of this short story. The parallels to the descriptions of O'Faolain's childhood memories in other places are unmistakable, for example his personal memory of living in shared dormitories set up by the homeowners in rooms under the roof or with regard to the leisure activities of the students. The setting of the short story is a typically Irish location in the Gaeltacht . O'Faolain's biographer Maurice Harmon even goes so far as to use the description in the short story to name Tuirin Dubh as the setting of the story - the place where O'Faolain spent his summers as a teenager. The time of the short story also corresponds to the author's presence in life .

The criticism of the authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland, which is clearly echoed in The Man Who Invented Sin, must not be misunderstood as a general anti-Catholic statement by O'Faolain. O'Faolain neither explicitly opposed Irish nationalism , nor did he give up his Catholic faith in later years . Although he clearly opposed the inhumane, inhuman attitude or attitude of the Catholic clergy in Ireland, his various trips abroad prevented a complete rejection of the Catholic faith itself. He writes autobiographical: "I was in fact Exactly forty-six years old before I finally abandoned the faith of my fathers, and under the life-loving Example of Italy, wurde converted to Roman Catholicism" (dt loosely translated:. "In fact, I was exactly 46 years old when I gave up my fathers' faith and converted to Roman Catholicism under the fun-loving example of Italy . " ).

Position in O'Faolain's literary work

The man who invented sin is pretty much the focus of Sean O'Faolain's literary career and is counted among the best English-language short stories in literary studies. This story of O'Faolain forms an intersection of different lines of development between his early exuberantly enthusiastic and later ironically distant, sometimes cool-looking stories, as Kosok shows in his analysis. In The Man Who Invented Sin , the author's commitment is unbroken, but undoubtedly romantic approaches are designed with a controlled distance, so that the short story has in places comical but appropriate features, for example in the scene portrayed with full sympathy when Magdalen is with Dries the eyes of Brother Virgilius' red handkerchief (p. 49).

This creative phase of O'Faolain is characterized by, as he himself puts it, efforts to “sublety, compassion, understanding irony, and a perceptive awareness of the complexity of human nature” (meaning: “Fineness, compassion, understanding irony and attentive awareness of the complexity of the human being ” ) Formally, The Man Who Invented Sin stands between the two narrative forms of the “ tale ” and the “ short story ” , which O'Faolain tries to differentiate in his literary theoretical explanations. He describes the short story as “concentrated stuff” (ie a concentrated or compressed form of representation), while the “tale” (German story or narrative) differs from it. The "Tale" is "[...] much freer, contains more cargo, moves on, has time and space for more complex characterization, more mood changes, more events and scenes, even more action" (in the original: "[...] much more free, carries more cargo, roves farther, has time and space for more complex characterization, more changes of mood, more incidents and scenes, even more plot " ). The man who invented sin shows a high degree of concentration and concentration, but also contains a greater variety of events, characters, moods and nuances of meaning than the classic "short story" in the O'Faolainian sense.

In The Man Who Invented Sin , the portrayal of astutely observed, credibly narrated events, which certainly has a clearly accentuated general meaning, is linked with the author's political statement on the history of Ireland and its inhabitants, which gives the narrative an expanded basis in reality whereby the universal reference to the “origin of sin” is integrated into a concrete historical-political development.

literature

  • Sean O'Faolain: Liars and Lovers . Stories, translated by Elisabeth Schnack, Diogenes, Zurich 1998, ISBN 3-257-20742-5 .
  • Sean O'Faolain: The Man Who Invented Sin And Other Stories . Devin-Adair, New York, NY 1984 (first edition 1948), ISBN 0-8159-6212-6 (English).
  • Noreen O'Donovan (in collaboration with Wolfgang Staek): Great Irish Short Stories · Model Interpretations. Klett, Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-12-579130-8 , pp. 68-90.
  • Heinz Kosok: "Sean O'Faolain · The Man Who Invented Sin". In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story. Bagel, Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-513-02222-0 , pp. 254-265.
  • Heinz Kosok: History of Anglo-Irish Literature. Schmidt, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-503-03004-2 .
  • Heinz Kosok: The Irish Short Story in the 20th Century. In: Arno Löffler and Eberhard Späth (eds.): History of the English short story , Francke, Tübingen et al. 2005, ISBN 3-8252-2662-X , pp. 246-271.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sean O'Faolain, Liar and Lover · Stories - Translated from the English by Elisabeth Schnack. Diogenes Verlag Zurich 1980, ISBN 3-257-20742-5 .
  2. ↑ a b See Heinz Kosok: "Sean O'Faolain · The Man Who Invented Sin" . In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story . Bagel Verlag Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-513-02222-0 , p. 258.
  3. ↑ See text p. 51. See also (English) Noreen O'Donovan (in collaboration with Wolfgang Staek): Great Irish Short Stories · Model Interpretations , Klett Verlag Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-12-579130-8 , p. 84
  4. ↑ Text citations are also taken from the Lügner und Lovers collection in Diogenes Verlag, Zurich 1980, ISBN 3-257-20742-5 . See also the interpretation by Noreen O'Donovan (in collaboration with Wolfgang Staek): Great Irish Short Stories · Model Interpretations , Klett Verlag Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-12-579130-8 , p. 89.
  5. ↑ See Heinz Kosok: "Sean O'Faolain · The Man Who Invented Sin" . In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story . Bagel Verlag Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-513-02222-0 , pp. 258f.
  6. ↑ See the edition of the original text in: Noreen O'Donovan (in collaboration with Wolfgang Staek): Great Irish Short Stories · Model Interpretations , Klett Verlag Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-12-579130-8 , p. 77.
  7. ^ On this interpretation, see Heinz Kosok: "Sean O'Faolain · The Man Who Invented Sin" . In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story . Bagel Verlag Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-513-02222-0 , pp. 259 and 261f., As well as Noreen O'Donovan (in collaboration with Wolfgang Staek): Great Irish Short Stories · Model Interpretations , Klett Verlag Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3- 12-579130-8 , p. 89.
  8. ↑ See in detail on the biblical symbolism in the text Heinz Kosok: "Sean O'Faolain · The Man Who Invented Sin" . In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story . Bagel Verlag Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-513-02222-0 , pp. 262f. and Noreen O'Donovan (in collaboration with Wolfgang Staek): Great Irish Short Stories · Model Interpretations , Klett Verlag Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-12-579130-8 , p. 84.
  9. ↑ Heinz Kosok: "Sean O'Faolain · The Man Who Invented Sin" . In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story . Bagel Verlag Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-513-02222-0 , pp. 259 and 261f., As well as Noreen O'Donovan (in collaboration with Wolfgang Staek): Great Irish Short Stories · Model Interpretations , Klett Verlag Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3- 12-579130-8 , pp. 84f.
  10. ↑ See e.g. B. Wolfgang Bauer et al. (Ed.): Lexicon of symbols. Fourier Verlag, 15th ed. Wiesbaden 1994. ISBN 3-921695-54-6 , p. 225.
  11. ↑ a b c Cf. Noreen O'Donovan (in collaboration with Wolfgang Staek): Great Irish Short Stories · Model Interpretations , Klett Verlag Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-12-579130-8 , pp. 87f.
  12. ↑ See the interpretation by Heinz Kosok: "Sean O'Faolain · The Man Who Invented Sin" . In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story . Bagel Verlag Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-513-02222-0 , p. 262.
  13. ↑ On the interpretation of the symbolism, see Heinz Kosok in detail: "Sean O'Faolain · The Man Who Invented Sin" . In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story . Bagel Verlag Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-513-02222-0 , p. 264.
  14. ↑ See details Heinz Kosok: "Sean O'Faolain · The Man Who Invented Sin" . In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story . Bagel Verlag Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-513-02222-0 , pp. 258 and 263f.
  15. ↑ See also Heinz Kosok: "Sean O'Faolain · The Man Who Invented Sin" . In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story . Bagel Verlag Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-513-02222-0 , pp. 258 and 263ff. See also Noreen O'Donovan (in collaboration with Wolfgang Staek): Great Irish Short Stories · Model Interpretations. Klett Verlag Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-12-579130-8 , p. 86
  16. ↑ See in detail Heinz Kosok: "Sean O'Faolain · The Man Who Invented Sin" . In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story . Bagel Verlag Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-513-02222-0 , pp. 259ff.
  17. ↑ a b See Heinz Kosok: "Sean O'Faolain · The Man Who Invented Sin" . In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story . Bagel Verlag Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-513-02222-0 , p. 260.
  18. ↑ See Heinz Kosok: "Sean O'Faolain · The Man Who Invented Sin" . In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story . Bagel Verlag Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-513-02222-0 , pp. 261f.
  19. ↑ See in detail Maurice Harmon: Sean O'Faolain: A Critical Introduction . Wolfshound Press Dublin 1984, p. 44f., And Heinz Kosok: "Sean O'Faolain · The Man Who Invented Sin" . In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story . Bagel Verlag Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-513-02222-0 , pp. 256f.
  20. ↑ Quoted from Noreen O'Donovan (in collaboration with Wolfgang Staek): Great Irish Short Stories · Model Interpretations , Klett Verlag Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-12-579130-8 , p. 85.
  21. ↑ See Heinz Kosok: "Sean · The Man Who Invented Sin" . In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story . Bagel Verlag Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-513-02222-0 , pp. 263f.
  22. ^ PA Doyle: Sean O'Faolain . Twayne's English Authors Series 70, New York 1968, p. 96. Quoted here from Heinz Kosok: "Sean · The Man Who Invented Sin" . In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story . Bagel Verlag Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-513-02222-0 , pp. 264f.
  23. ↑ Quoted from: Noreen O'Donovan (in collaboration with Wolfgang Staek): Great Irish Short Stories · Model Interpretations , Klett Verlag Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-12-579130-8 , p. 82.
  24. ↑ See also the information from Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story . Bagel Verlag Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-513-02222-0 , p. 265.