Otherness, language, and Paddy

The early dinner conversations in "Loving" seemed to portray the Irish lampman Paddy as a deranged figure. Laughing incomprehensibly and muttering to himself, the reader quickly develops an image a schizophrenic madman hovering on the edge of the conversation, though an erroneous one. In denying the reader the ability to understand Paddy's speech, Green places him in the position of the "other" for the reader in a way that transcends quotation marks and apostrophes.

No matter what Paddy says or does, his voice automatically marks him as an "other" as far as the principal characters are concerned.  Even though Paddy ostensibly speaks English, the other major characters require Kate to act as an English-to-English translator. Speech aside, Paddy's being Irish already makes him a figure for distrust and suspicion for the principal characters. If his dialogue were placed in terms of quotation marks and apostrophes and odd spelling in order to convey his accent, his dialogue would still be comprehensible and (relatively) normal to the reader in a way that descriptions of his grunting and muttering are not.  The result is that in denying the reader the details of his dialogue, the reader is placed in the same frame of mind towards Paddy as that of Raunce and the others without needing any of the social or political context of the English-Irish distrust.