'better in his grave than in that bed': The Construction of Rest in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds

Abstract

Though not a text that is inherently medical in nature, sleep and rest play central roles in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds at all levels of the novel. O’Brien’s representations of rest are ideologically loaded, indexing stigmatising social perceptions of those seen to spend ‘excessive’ time in bed as inherently burdensome, unpleasant, and deserving of suspicion. These portrayals are found throughout At Swim-Two-Birds, both in its moments of digression and, more prominently, in the depictions of Dermot Trellis and the student narrator, whose rest is repeatedly linked with deviancy and the grotesque. This article is an intervention into previous criticism of At Swim-Two-Birds, reorienting the focus of conversation to the often ableist and disparaging representations of rest and literal, embodied fatigue by recentring the novel’s key image of the man in bed.