Doyle delineates Paddy’s life in the three aspects that function as pillars of a ten-year-old child’s everyday life: friends, school and family life. Reynolds and Noakes describe Paddy Carke as “one of Doyle’s most disturbing novels t begins as a celebration of childhood but ends as a memorial both for childhood and for marriage” (114).Īs the novel’s setting mainly functions as a physical metaphor of Paddy’s development, it is important to analyze the story’s time and place first which will be done in the following chapter. The decay of Patrick’s, nicknamed Paddy, parents’ marriage is juxtaposed with the destruction of his natural environment due to council development schemes all resulting in Paddy becoming an object of derision by his former mates, culminating in the scornful verse: “Paddy Clarke, Paddy Clarke has no Da! Ha ha ha” (Doyle 281). Doyle accomplishes to allegorize ten-year-old Patrick’s transformation through the novel’s setting, his attitude towards violence and his shifting sense of identity and values. The novel addresses the impact of domestic violence and divorce on a child and depicts the resulting transformation of a well-liked and roguish ten-year-old Irish boy into a prematurely grown-up expelled adolescent who goes to great effort to assume responsibility for his family and fill the gap his father leaves when he walks out on his wife and his four little children.

The story is about the gradual disintegration of Patrick’s parents’ marriage and his family’s enduring the consequences of the crumbling union.

The award-winning novel, “Paddy Clarke HA HA HA,” by Irish author, Roddy Doyle, is a narrative written in the voice of a ten-year-old boy, Patrick Clarke.

Paddy clarke ha ha