A Figurative Reading of the Play Molly Sweeney by Brian Friel, on the Basis of the Holy Bible*

Contradictions between the literal and figurative forms of the rhetoric figures, as a form of language, has represented itself a polemical matter into the classical literary and dramatic texts. For the researchers all across the world, surveying literature archetypes, literary and linguistic approaches for better understanding of two literary forms, Literal and Figurative, always was a prominent issue. Erich Auerbach is one the authors who probed into the two central archetypes of the western literature, the homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Holy Bible. He compares two important literal texts with each other, which where he creates two new world by those two texts. Brian Friel is the most prominent dramatist of Ireland in the last fifty years. Dramatist Experts of Ireland believe that he is a true successor of playwrights like Yeats, Synge and O’Casey. Many Irish experts call Him “Ireland’s Chekhov”. He studied at catholic school and church to be a priest. Then he changed his path to be an instructor, narrator and playwright at a same time. The play “Molly Sweeney”, Brian Friel artwork, is one of those special cases impressed partly by both Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and biblical archetypes and its literal and figurative literary forms. Sometimes in literary and dramatic texts, we face an obscure and dark point where the text tells nothing about them. To be more precise, sometimes the reader faces a question about the characters or the story or sometimes he or she is unable to understand part of the text correctly where the text has no answer for that. Therefore, the “ambiguity” is the problem in such texts. As a result, without attaining all semantic arrangements and word order, one cannot attain the fact. Also without considering the artwork’s general context, no correct readings happen. A context consisting of words, clauses and sentences bound to each other, forms a shape that shows how to face the artwork. Therefore, necessity to mind the “Context”, forwards us toward the correct answers to the questions or ambiguities. Ambiguity in relationships between the “Mother” and “Father” character and “The father not letting Molly to go to school ” is not an issue perceivable in text’s first semantic and literal level of language. According to Friel himself who studied at catholic school, close to grab the priest title and considering him as an author with language-centric concerns, and the analyzable signs of the Bible context into the text, figurative readings of the play and discovering hidden metaphors into ambiguities, through Erich Auerbach and his book ”Mimesis”, rises the necessity of forming aforesaid question. This is why understanding a quite literal text is simple and semantic arrangement in a certain pattern needs no influence on words’ meaning. Therefore, the pattern could be metaphoric. As a result, we face a form of metaphoric pattern in Molly Sweeney which necessity of close reading between Molly Sweeney’s play text and the Bible, in a descriptive and analytical manner, leads to form a metaphoric pattern and answering the text’s internal ambiguities.