Moran the Parent: Part Two

Continued from Moran the Parent: Part One

Through the second half of Molloy, Moran transforms into something like a delirious woodsman. From what can be understood of his increasingly incoherent narration, he eats little and camps outside of towns—with names like Turdy, Hole, and Condom—that may not exist. Time passes in days, then weeks, then months, and Moran forgets the very purpose of his trip: "I still did not know what I was to do with Malloy, when I found him" (152).

As the strict order of his previous life erodes, Moran's role as a parent reverses. While once he cast himself as a powerful but unappreciated father ("That was all the thanks I got" he thinks, watching his sick son grimace during a forced meal), now, robbed and abandoned by that same son and finding a paltry 15 shillings left in his possession, he says "my first feeling was of gratitude for his leaving me this little sum... and I saw in this a kind of delicacy!" (155). Moran, who once so frequently congratulated himself on his tough-love parenting, has become dependent on his child. Soon, his hope for a reunion with young Jacques morphs into a desire for a father figure of his own:

I dallied with the hopes that.... my son, his anger spent, would have pity on me and come back to me! Or that Molloy... would come to me... and grow to be a friend, and like a father to me, and would help me do what I had to do, so that Youdi would not be angry with me and would not punish me! (156)

For all the fear he sought to drive into his son, more and more, Moran—not his son—resembles a scared child.

But as Moran spirals lower (to Gaber: "Is [Youdi] angry?... I'm asking you if he is angry, I cried"), the question becomes: Is the change in Moran, or the way in which he is presented (158)?