Memory, Nostalgia, and The Past Theme Analysis

Throughout Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Brian Friel explores the way people conceive of their own memories, illustrating how they often manipulate or distort their conceptions of the past in order to trick themselves into feeling happy. Gar recognizes this tendency amongst his peers in Ireland as he prepares to travel to the United States. Unlike his friends, he appears unwilling to shine an unrealistically positive light on his past. Cognizant that neither he nor anyone else will ever be able to change what has already happened, he becomes critical of the ways in which everyone around him exalts bygone days and invests themselves in memories that exist as abstractions fixed in an inaccessible past. At the same time, though, he also romanticizes the future by hoping to escape troubling emotions by moving to United States. By mining this contradictory dynamic, then, Friel uses Philadelphia, Here I Come! to issue a warning not only about using change to avoid emotional hardship, but also about idealizing certain memories to ignore the true nature of one’s past. 

Gar has already realized at the outset of the play that he’ll never be able to recapture the happiness of his past. This is because the time period he most yearns to return to actually doesn’t belong to his past, since it took place before he was born ,when his mother was still alive. Because she died three days after giving birth to him, he never got to meet her, but he often thinks about what her life must have been like. While packing the night before his journey to the United States, he opens an old suitcase and finds a newspaper clipping of his parents’ wedding announcement, causing him and his internal self or alter ego, Private Gar, to reminisce about what Madge (the housekeeper) has told them about their mother. As Private Gar considers her memory, though, he suddenly cuts himself off by quoting a speech delivered by the 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke, in which Burke bemoaned the bygone peaceful days of France before the French Revolution. By repeating Burke’s overtly nostalgic words about how beautiful Marie Antoinette (the Queen of France) was before she was decapitated, Private Gar reminds himself that it’s unproductive to fixate on what can’t be changed. In keeping with this, Public Gar belts out, “Philadelphia, here I come,” clearly wanting to turn his attention to the present and the future instead of letting the memory of his late mother consume his life.

Unlike Gar, the people around him are very attached to the past. This is especially apparent when his friend Ned speaks boisterously about a night he and several pals had together. Although Gar was present, Ned tells him what happened, saying that he, Tom, and another friend named Jimmy went into a set of caves to go swimming with two women. According to Ned, he and Tom decided to go for a swim while Jimmy remained with the women. Shortly thereafter, he claims, they saw Jimmy running away naked, yelling, “Save me, boys, save me!” while the two women chased him. After Ned finishes this story, everyone laughs and celebrates the humorous memory, but Gar privately recalls that he was also there that night. Ned, he knows, has altered the story—in reality, they all went swimming in front of the girls, and then they decided to try to take Jimmy’s pants off as a joke. When they approached him, though, Jimmy managed to fend all of them off, wrestling them to the ground before they finally decided to head home, leaving the two women in the cave. Needless to say, this story isn’t quite as humorous as Ned’s version, which made the night sound wild and hilarious when it was actually quite unremarkable and perhaps a bit pathetic (insofar as the boys behaved childishly in front of the women). Gar’s recognition of Ned’s fabrication is important to note, since it shows that he’s sensitive to the ways people refigure the past to make it sound more appealing in the moment.

Like Ned, Gar’s father, S.B., also exhibits a certain kind of unfounded nostalgia about the past. In a conversation with Madge, he speaks extensively about a sailor suit Gar used to wear as a young boy, fondly remembering how cute and loving the boy used to be. And though this might not be an inaccurate memory, his emotional recollection is out of step with the fact that he failed, even when Gar was a boy, to foster a sense of connection between himself and his son. Nonetheless, he chooses to focus only on this tender memory, not recalling the reality of his relationship with Gar during that period. Private Gar comments on this myopic view of the past when he periodically quotes Edmund Burke’s wistful speech about the days before the French Revolution. After all, Burke is right that the French Revolution was a ghastly and bloody affair, but there’s no denying that the revolution changed the course of history for the better, largely putting an end to feudalism and absolute monarchy and giving rise to more egalitarian modes of governance. By irreverently referencing Burke’s nostalgia about Europe before the French Revolution, then, Private Gar critiques the human tendency to become overly sentimental about the past in a way that blinds people to the necessity of change. And though Friel also uses Gar’s obsession with moving to the United States to caution against the pitfalls of using change as a means of emotional escape, he intimates that nostalgia is often regressive and emotionally unproductive.