The Rachel Incident

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-15

Chapters 16-20

Chapters 21-25

Chapter 26-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Famine

Content Warning: This section of the guide briefly mentions abortion and anti-gay bias.

Throughout The Rachel Incident, famine functions as a motif representing the deficits in the Harrington-Byrne marriage. Byrne’s book, The Kensington Diet, is about the historical Irish famine. In the book, he argues (unconvincingly, to Rachel’s ears) that the famine continues to linger in Irish consciousness: “Dr. Byrne almost sounded like he thought the famine was a good thing. He seemed to think most worthwhile books and paintings sprung out of the potato blight, and I wondered if Deenie ever told him to calm it down a little” (167). Later, he confesses sheepishly to Rachel that he might have been obsessed with famine because of his own too-large body and his attempts to diet. For him, famine is associated with art produced out of emptiness and, personally, with his own bodily shame. Rachel also comes to understand that, as a queer man who came of age when homosexuality was still illegal in Ireland, he might also associate famine with another form of bodily shame and stigma: “Think about the things I’ve seen, the news stories I was terrorised with, the deadly body I was told that I might become. I later wondered whether Dr. Byrne’s famine obsession wasn’t just about being thin, but about AIDS, and the freedom to think about wasting” (167). This fear and secrecy lead to cracks in Byrne’s marriage as well, since he is not truthful about his sexuality with Deenie.

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Deenie is also associated with the famine motif, most notably through her infertility. When Rachel learns that Fred’s book is about famine, she quotes “The Famine Road” by Eavan Boland. Boland, a poet widely taught in Irish schools, uses famine throughout the poem to reflect on the potato blight as well as the narrator’s infertility: “What is your body now […] If not a famine road” (39). Deenie’s infertility is a source of great pain to her and negatively affects Byrne’s desire for her sexually. The famine here represents the pain and deprivation present in their relationship.

Wonder Woman

As she comes of age, Rachel struggles with feeling awkward about her physical appearance, especially her height and weight. In the novel, Wonder Woman symbolizes an ideal woman, one who has embraced her tall and majestic body. In comics, Wonder Woman is an Amazon warrior, raised in a world without men and thus completely unaware that she should be ashamed of her height or diminish herself in any way. Initially, Rachel references the character when she is flirting with Dr. Byrne. He refers to Hemingway as “Batman for fat, bookish boys” and she responds, “Like Dorothy Parker […] is Wonder Woman for depressed girls” (38). Here, the Wonder Woman metaphor is expressly not about physicality—instead, the notably sharp-tongued Parker is the stand-in version for girls who want to live only in the mind. At this point, Rachel does not see Wonder Woman as a real possibility for herself, given her discomfort with her appearance.

Deenie unwittingly solidifies this insecurity when she says that she saw Rachel and thought “Oh God, how silly, she’s just a chubby student with a crush” (205). As an adult, Rachel says, “This is the line that I have come back to the most. On my worst days, on my bad dates, on the job interviews that didn’t quite work out the way they should” (205). In contrast to this assessment of her, Carey sees Rachel as someone who is irresistibly attractive. He tells her, “Rachel, you’ve got a body like Wonder Woman” (106). Though Rachel dismisses this statement at the time, it comes back to her later and she decides to dress and style herself differently. She thinks that “the way he saw [her] left an impression. It changed how [she] saw [her]self” (262). She starts to see her physicality as desirable, rather than awkward.

Shandon Street

Shandon Street is the neighborhood where Rachel and James Devlin live together in Cork. They move into a historic cottage that Rachel is delighted by. As an adult, she reflects on the fact that “the house was incredibly run down” and the condition was “unacceptable,” but admits that these things “would matter to me now, but they didn’t then, and even though I spent most of the following year drunk and malnourished, I sometimes wonder if I was maybe better off not caring” (24). The cottage symbolizes Rachel and James’s transformation into adulthood and connects to the novel’s themes of exploration and youth. The cottage is the site of Rachel’s transformation from a child into an adult woman who makes her own decisions and develops her own moral code. However, she struggles to explain Shandon Street to outsiders: “Where would I start? How could you understand the year in Shandon Street unless you were there, with us, living it?” (8). The confession she writes that forms The Rachel Incident is a way to explain Shandon Street and its meaning not only to herself but to Deenie as well.