Compassion and Acceptance of Human Animality in a Selection of Liam O’Flaherty’s Stories

Liam O’Flaherty’s numerous stories dealing with animals are generally considered his best artistic efforts. Scholars have highlighted how he humbled anthropocentric pride and even effaced the narrator and the human point of view from them. My contention, however, is that these stories can also be interpreted as O’Flaherty’s literary meditation on the absence of ‘good discontinuities’ between humans and animals, and on the importance of constructing the human/animal encounter on the acceptance of the existence of an interspecies communion. In his stories, humans do not necessarily possess something that animals lack, such as the capability of feeling compassion. Humans often fail to have compassion for other animals or human beings, for they deny that a communion obtains among all the living. These humans are capable of taking delight in another’s suffering and so disrupt both their equilibrium with potentially negative consequences and the present ‘ecological equilibrium’, which has to be restored. Hence, O’Flaherty’s short stories can be seen as earlier literary responses to contemporary works on human/animal ethics and genuine ethe of care (Derrida; Nussbaum; Wolfe), which will be discussed here together with selected empirical studies on the same subject (de Waal; Goetz, Keltner, and Simon-Thomas).