Roddy Doyle is a well known modern Irish writer. Unfortunately there is little information available about his life to date. This fact makes it difficult to write a comprehensive essay on the life of Roddy Doyle. The essay on this page is poorly written but covers the life of Roddy Doyle well. The author covers the main points in Doyle's life as well a discusses some of his major works.
The author begins the essay with a discussion of Doyle's schooling. This discussion is important for individuals doing research on Roddy Doyle. The discussion is succinct and informative. The author uses this merely as background and as a platform for beginning the main body of the paper. By placing this information in the introduction of the paper, the author allows makes this information easily available to those doing research on the subject.
Doyle's life is also discussed in the essay. The author discusses Doyle's initial difficulty in becoming published. The essay then follows Doyle's career to the present fame which he enjoys. It then discusses Doyle's challenges and his desire to write a realistic novel. The author does an excellent job of showing the reader that Doyle must struggle to write about the subjects he does since they are quite foreign to him. However, little time is spent discussing these topics. Rather, the author dwells on some of the major works of Doyle.
The essay describes Doyle's basis for his characters and the themes on which he focuses. Then it becomes a discussion of Doyle's most recent novel, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. The rest of the essay is spent in two ways: describing the effects of the novel on society and presenting various interpretations of the novel. The essay does a very good job of discussing these points and it presents an interesting perspective on the novel.
For this essay to be a more comprehensive discussion of Doyle, the author should have discussed more than one novel in depth. There are several points made about Doyle's use of humor and seriousness which should have been expanded and discussed more in depth. By discussing more than one work, the author would have been able to more effectively presented this argument. Another method for focusing more on Doyle would have been to concentrate more on Doyle's past. This last method would have been much more difficult as there is very little information available on the subject. If it were the author's desire to discuss the works of Doyle, more attention should have been paid to other works. Rather than concentrate on The Woman Who Walks Into Doors the author should have discussed such award winning novels as Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha more fully. Such things as what made this novel so successful and the importance of the award it won should have been included. The essay, "Roddy Doyle," does a good job presenting information on both Doyle's life and his major works. Unfortunately the author spends too much time concentrating on a single work, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. The essay, by the end, has become a discussion of this work rather than a discussion of Doyle. However the author does do a good job tying the discussion of the work to the previous discussion of Doyle's purpose for writing. There are several things which the author should consider to make the discussion of Doyle more complete. Overall, this is a poorly written (organizationally) but informative paper.