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Articles

Volume 15, Number 1 (1990)

Strangely Strung Beads: Wayne Johnston's Story of Bobby O'Malley

  • Jeanette Lynes
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1990-01-01

Abstract

Wayne Johnston's Story of Bobby O'Malley is self-referential and parodic. Storytelling in the late twentieth century must somehow account for the perceived chaos of the era. There is always present a tension between the ostensible orderliness of storytelling and the strangeness of the lives which the story is examining. Storytelling plays upon the boundaries between reality and illusion, truth and lies, presence and absence, and thus Bobby O'Malley's narrative constantly vacillates between concealing and revealing.