Families Portrayed In Roddy Doyle's Books

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day. The Rabbitte family is used in all three novels
that make up the "Barrytown Trilogy." While the times are both good and bad for
the eight members of this Irish family, in some way they find a way overcome
every problem that faces them.
One of Doyle's strengths is his feel for personality: his characters are
neither devils nor clowns, dolts nor wits, but wobble between the extremes.
"They're fish gutters and mechanics, young knockabouts and unemployed workers
who spend a lot of time watching T.V. drinking Guinness and jawing at the pub,
trying to stave off the feelings that they are nondescript people in a
nondescript world."2
The Commitments is Doyle's first full-length novel. The main character
Jimmy Rabbitte, the eldest son, puts together a band. It is almost every
teenager's dream, at some point, to be famous playing music in front of large
groups of people. In fact, this is how this book started off. In the end,
however, it turns out to be the complete opposite. Doyle ...

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accomplished. The Commitments worked as a team to reach its success
but when the group was on the brink of acheiving stardom individual motives
began to cause problems. When the band stopped acting like a family unit the
fights broke out. "Somewhere in the quarter of an hour Jimmy had been
negotiating with Dave from Eejit Records, The Commitments had broken up." Jimmy
came to the conclusion that it was over. He moved on and kept his mind off the
band. Success had in fact destroyed the once harmonious group.

In The Snapper Doyle uses a interesting topic: pregnancy. Sharon, the
eldest Rabitte daughter accidentally gets pregnant. In the end, the father turns
out to be her own ...

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