In Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Friel draws a stark distinction between a person’s internal and external worlds by splitting the play’s protagonist, Gar, into two separate characters: “Private” Gar and “Public” Gar, each one played by a different actor. Public Gar, the playwright explains, is the Gar who everyone else in the play sees, but Private Gar is “the unseen man, the man within, the conscience, the alter ego, the secret thoughts, the id.” In this capacity, Private is more straightforward and assertive than Public, indulging Gar’s wildest fantasies about getting rich or becoming important. However, egging Public on isn’t Private’s only role, as one might expect from a character playing a person’s id, the part of the psyche that is driven by primal desires. Rather, Private exhibits the ability to exercise prudence and restraint, as is the case when he urges Public to stop speaking so angrily to his former lover, Kate. As a result, Private is more than just a devil on Public’s shoulder, but a representation of Public’s entire internal world. Furthermore, the fact that Public sometimes fails to follow Private’s advice is a sign that it’s often difficult for people to bridge the gap between their inner feelings and their outward behavior. In keeping with this, Friel’s study of the intersection between a person’s private and public lives highlights the complex and variable nature of identity, ultimately proving that people contain multitudes.
At the beginning of the play, Friel introduces Private with a stage note that frames him as the side of Gar’s personality that knows no restraint. He refers to him as Gar’s “id,” meaning that Private is the part of Gar that is instinctual and unbound by extraneous concerns about how to behave. This makes sense, considering that he is the private side of Gar, so he can act however he wants without having to worry about what other people think. As such, he is bold and shamelessly confident, waxing poetic about how triumphant Gar’s imminent journey to the United States will be. Moreover, he urges Gar to brazenly forget about people like his father, telling him he should stick his head out of the plane window the following day and “spit down on the lot of them.” By indulging these self-aggrandizing fantasies, Private tries to get Gar to embrace what he wants for the future without paying attention to anything else.
Although Private initially seems like the embodiment of Gar’s unchecked desires, it’s worth observing that he’s actually more complicated and three-dimensional than he first appears. Friel’s stage note describes Private with words that build an image of him as confident and mischievous, associating him with “the alter ego, the secret thoughts, the id.” However, the playwright also defines Private as Gar’s conscience. This suggests that he is the voice or force that guides Gar by telling him the best way to act, constantly gauging what is right and what is wrong. Needless to say, this tendency toward measured evaluation contradicts with the other half of Friel’s description. In fact, it also conflicts with the manner in which Private conducts himself during the first scene, when he boldly invites Gar to think self-aggrandizing thoughts. But this contradiction, it seems, is integral to the nature of Gar’s internal voice, which encompasses an entire range of emotion and temperament.
It would be easy to assume that the distinction between Public and Private Gar is clean and simple, since the mere fact that Friel makes a distinction between the two suggests that each side of Gar’s personality must be the other’s polar opposite. This, in turn, creates the impression that Private is on one end of a spectrum while Public is on the other, but this isn’t necessarily the case. For instance, Private sometimes tries to urge Gar to act with care and prudence, like when he tells him to stop talking to Kate about how much he hates Ireland. Listening to Public ramble on in an angry tone about how Ballybeg is a terrible place, Private realizes that he’s upsetting Kate and offending her, since she herself has no plans to leave Ballybeg, so he pleads with Public Gar to change the subject, demonstrating that he has more social intelligence than one would normally attribute to a person’s id. Accordingly, Friel’s decision to separate Gar into two characters hints at his belief that people aren’t always what their outward appearances suggest. To that end, the nuanced and wide-ranging nature of Gar’s internal identity is a testament to the fact that people can’t be reduced to just one personality, as Gar’s multifaceted identity demonstrates that people often harbor entire worlds of emotion and temperament beneath their public persona.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Public Life, Private Life, and Identity ThemeTracker
Public Life, Private Life, and Identity Quotes in Philadelphia, Here I Come!
Private: You are full conscious of all the consequences of your decision?
Public: Yessir.
Private: Of leaving the country of your birth, the land of the curlew and the snipe, the Aran sweater and the Irish Sweepstakes?
Public: (with fitting hesitation) I-I-I-I have considered all these. Sir.
Private: Of going to a profane, irreligious, pagan country of gross materialism?
Public: I am fully sensitive to this. Sir.
Public: Whether he says good-bye to me or not, or whether he slips me a few miserable quid or not, it’s a matter of total indifference to me, Madge.
Madge: Aye, so. Your tea’s on the table—but that’s a matter of total indifference to me.
Public: Give me time to wash, will you?
Madge: And another thing: just because he doesn’t say much doesn’t mean that he hasn’t feelings like the rest of us.
Public: Say much? He’s said nothing!
Madge: He said nothing either when your mother died.
Private: Yeah. You mentioned that your father was a businessman. What’s his line?
Public: Well, Sir, he has—what you would call—his finger in many pies—retail mostly—general dry goods—assorted patent drugs—hardware—ah—ah—dehydrated fish—men’s king-size hose—snuffs from the exotic East . . . of Donegal—a confection for gourmets, known as Peggy’s Leg—weedkiller—(Suddenly breaking off: in his normal accent: rolling on the bed.) Yahoooooo! It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles—
Private: Let’s git packin’, boy.
Private: (quietly, rapidly insisting) Are you going to take her photograph to the States with you? When are you going to say good-bye to her? Will you write to her? Will you send her cards and photographs? You loved her once, old rooster; you wanted so much to marry her that it was a bloody sickness. Tell me, randy boy; tell me the truth: have you got over that sickness? Do you still love her? Do you still lust after her? Well, do you? Do you? Do you?
Public: Bugger! (Public suddenly stops dancing, switches—almost knocks—off the record-player, pulls a wallet out of his hip pocket and produces a snap. He sits and looks at it.)
Private: (wearily) Mrs Doctor Francis King. September 8th. In harvest sunshine. […] By God, Gar, aul sod, it was a sore hoke on the aul prestige, eh? Between ourselves, aul son, in the privacy of the bedroom, between you and me and the wall, as the fella says, has it left a deep scar on the aul skitter of a soul, eh? What I mean to say like, you took it sort of bad, between you and me and the wall, as the fella says—
Public: (sings)
‘Philadelphia, here I come, right back—’
Private: But then there’s more fish in the sea, as the fella says […].
Screwballs, we’ve eaten together like this for the past twenty-odd years, and never once in all that time have you made as much as one unpredictable remark. Now, even though you refuse to acknowledge the fact, Screwballs, I’m leaving you for ever. I’m going to Philadelphia, to work in an hotel. And you know why I’m going. Screwballs, don’t you. Because I’m twenty-five, and you treat me as if I were five—I can’t order even a dozen loaves without getting your permission. Because you pay me less than you pay Madge. But worse, far worse than that Screwballs, because—we embarrass one another. If one of us were to say, ‘You’re looking tired’ or ‘That’s a bad cough you have’, the other would fall over backways with embarrassment.
So tonight d’you know what I want you to do? I want you to make one unpredictable remark, and even though I’ll still be on that plane tomorrow morning, I’ll have doubts: Maybe I should have stuck it out; maybe the old codger did have feelings; maybe I have maligned the old bastard.
They open the door. Ned hesitates and begins taking off the broad leather belt with the huge brass buckle that supports his trousers.
Ned: (shyly, awkwardly) By the way. Gar, since I’ll not see you again before you go –
Tom: Hi! What are you at? At least wait till you’re sure of the women!
Ned: (impatiently to Tom) Agh, shut up! (to Public) If any of them Yankee scuts try to beat you up some dark night, you can…(Now he is very confused and flings the belt across the room to Public.) You know… there’s a bloody big buckle on it… manys a get I scutched with it…
[…]
Ned: You’ll make out all right over there…have a…
Tom: I know that look in his eyes!
Ned wheels rapidly on Tom, gives him a more than playful punch, and says savagely:
Ned: Christ, if there’s one get I hate, it’s you!
Joe and Tom and big, thick, generous Ned . . . No one will ever know or understand the fun there was; for there was fun and there was laughing—foolish, silly fun and foolish, silly laughing; but what it was all about you can’t remember, can you? Just the memory of it—that’s all you have now—just the memory; and even now, even so soon, it is being distilled of all its coarseness; and what’s left is going to be precious, precious gold…
Listen, if someone were to come along to me tonight and say, ‘Ballybeg’s yours—lock, stock, and barrel,’ it wouldn’t make that (cracks his fingers) much difference to me. If you’re not happy and content in a place— then—then—then you’re not happy and content in a place! It’s as simple as that. I’ve stuck around this hole far too long. I’m telling you: it’s a bloody quagmire, a backwater, a dead-end! And everybody in it goes crazy sooner or later! Everybody!
[…] there’s an affinity between Screwballs and me that no one, literally, no one could understand—except you, Canon (deadly serious), because you’re warm and kind and soft and sympathetic—all things to all men—because you could translate all this loneliness, this groping, this dreadful bloody buffoonery into Christian terms that will make life bearable for us all. And yet you don’t say a word.
S.B.: (justly, reasonably) There was a brown one belonging to the doctor, and before that there was a wee flat-bottom—but it was green—or was it white? I’ll tell you, you wouldn’t be thinking of a punt—it could have been blue—one that the curate had down at the pier last summer—
Private’s mocking laughter increases. Public rushes quickly into the shop. Private, still mocking, follows.
—a fine sturdy wee punt it was, too, and it could well have been the…
He sees that he is alone and tails off.
I can see him, with his shoulders back, and the wee head up straight, and the mouth, aw, man, as set, and says he this morning, I can hear him saying it, says he, ‘I’m not going to school. I’m going into my daddy’s business’—you know—all important—and, d’you mind, you tried to coax him to go to school, and not a move you could get out of him, and him as manly looking, and this wee sailor suit as smart looking on him, and—and—and at the heel of the hunt I had to go with him myself, the two of us, hand in hand, as happy as larks—we were that happy, Madge—and him dancing and chatting beside me—mind?—you couldn’t get a word in edge-ways with all the chatting he used to go through…
