Young Lonigan by James T. Farrell

Young Lonigan by James T. Farrell

"After they had left the parlor, Studs sat by the window. He looked out, watching the night strangeness, listening. The darkness was over everything like a warm bed-cover, and all the little sounds of night seemed to him as if they belonged to some great mystery. He listened to the wind in the tree by the window. The street was queer, and didn’t seem at all like Wabash Avenue. He watched a man pass, his heels beating a monotonous echo. Studs imagined him to be some criminal being pursued by a detective like Maurice Costello, who used to act detective parts for Vitagraph. He watched. He thought of Lucy on the street and himself bravely rescuing her from horrors more terrible than he could imagine."

(Young Lonigan, 62)

Studs Lonigan lives in a different world from those around him. Chicago exists as different set of sensations for Studs, who communes with his environment in a language foreign to the masses. The heat and hardness of day are replaced by the creeping and overwhelming softness of the Chicago night; it pushes the toughness out of his body, eliminates the immediacy of things and dulls the viciousness of life as an Irish boy without a future. Farrell writes Studs as a contemplative soul who verges on artistic sensitivity. When he examines his environment he is lost its texture and physical existence. He simply does not belong to the city the way it owns the community, the “people that lived, worked, suffered, procreated, aspired, filled out their little days, and died” (Young Lonigan, 147). By nature Studs cannot accept the authority or possessiveness of the city, but he is incapable of escape. It is as much a part of him as he is of it; there is a symbiosis at work in Young Lonigan that depends very deeply upon the moments Studs shares with the fading day. Darkness provides us a view of Studs’ psyche that is intensely personal and crucial to understanding him as not only a character, but a representation of a developing personality and moral code.

When darkness appears Studs is more vulnerable to both his hopes and his fears. At times he is overcome by visions of pain and hellfire; he is wracked by his Catholic guilt and a perceived lack of purity. “He puffed and looked about the dark and lonely place.