Stranger in Paradise

This chapter argues that Dante’s epic renaissance poem The Divine Comedy provides a key influence and scaffold for That They May Face the Rising Sun with Ruttledge playing the part of Dante and Jamesie that of Virgil. The chapter is also interested in McGahern’s use of Dante’s fellow Florentine Giotto and his mural ‘The Flight into Egypt’. This in turn connects to John Ruskin’s writings on Giotto and subsequently to Marcel Proust’s reverence for Ruskin as a stylist. Ultimately it is suggested that what McGahern was trying to achieve with That They May Face the Rising Sun was an ‘epic style’ and that his desire to write in such a way was influenced by Paolo Vivante’s study of Homer’s style, The Homeric Imagination.