1. Introduction The award-winning novel, "Paddy Clarke HA HA HA," by Irish author, Roddy Doyle, is a narrative written in the voice of a ten-year-old boy, Patrick Clarke. The story is about the gradual disintegration of Patrick's parents’ marriage and his family's enduring the consequences of the crumbling union. The novel addresses the impact of domestic violence and divorce on a child and depicts the resulting transformation of a well-liked and roguish ten-year-old Irish boy into a prematurely grown-up expelled adolescent who goes to great effort to assume responsibility for his family and fill the gap his father leaves when he walks out on his wife and his four little children. Doyle accomplishes to allegorize ten-year-old Patrick’s transformation through the novel’s setting, his attitude towards violence and his shifting sense of identity and values. The decay of Patrick’s, nicknamed Paddy, parents’ marriage is juxtaposed with the destruction of his natural environment due to council development schemes all resulting in Paddy becoming an object of derision by his former mates, culminating in the scornful verse: “Paddy Clarke, Paddy Clarke has no Da! Ha ha ha” (Doyle 281). Reynolds and Noakes describe Paddy Carke as “one of Doyle’s most disturbing novels [as] [i]t begins as a celebration of childhood but ends as a memorial both for childhood and for marriage” (114). As the novel’s setting mainly functions as a physical metaphor of Paddy’s development, it is important to analyze the story’s time and place first which will be done in the following chapter. Doyle delineates Paddy’s life in the three aspects that function as pillars of a ten-year-old child’s everyday life: friends, school and family life. Consequently, it is necessary to how Paddy’s confrontation with violence outside the home is depicted in the third chapter before addressing the boys recount of domestic violence in the fourth chapter of this essay. Finally there will be a basis set for a recount of Paddy’s transformation from an imprudent little boy to a responsible-minded adolescent eager to be the male head in his single-parent family. 2. The Setting Barrytown - Late 1960s In Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, Doyle uses the urbanisation of the fictional Dublin suburb of Barrytown in order to support the theme of the protagonist’s development. Paddy’s family, the Clarkes own a house in a semi-rural community mostly consisting of middle-class families. Barrytown is based on the suburb of Kilbarrack in the north-east of Dublin, the place where Doyle himself grew up and experienced the transformation from a semi-rural place in the 1950s into a working class suburb in the course of his childhood (Paschel 69-70). Telling the story “through the comic-realism of a child’s imagination” (Strongman 32), Doyle accomplishes to portray Barrytown’s fictitious community and surroundings with striking authenticity to an extent where the attempt to draw parallels between Paddy’s and Doyle’s own childhood becomes almost inevitable. By the time the narrative begins, Barrytown is already in the middle of a transformative process since Paddy reports that the suburb is full of building sites for new Council Housing Estates: “There wasn’t only one building site; there were loads of them, all different types of houses” (Doyle 5). However, initially, Barrytown can be compared to a peaceful island as it is situated between Dublin city and the countryside, being separate from the other suburbs at the same time (Paschel 74). Paddy and his friends have annexed the streets and fields of Barrytown as their own territory. Small and intimate, it still offers many opportunities for exiting games and childish pranks. Paddy recounts his relationship with Barrytown before the start of the building process: We didn’t need bikes then. We walked; we ran. We ran away. That was the best, running away. We shouted at watchmen, we threw stones at windows, we played knick-knack - and ran away. We owned Barrytown, the whole lot of it. It went on forever. It was a country. (Doyle 150) However, in the course of the novel Paddy describes the urbanisation of Barrytown which goes along with Paddy’s development and therefore serves as some kind of a physical metaphor of his withering childhood. Doyle manages to create “ironic awareness in the reader of the innocence that Paddy will soon lose” (Reynolds and Noakes n.pag.). Precisely speaking, the mature reader is able to assess Paddy’s situation better than he does, thus, foreseeing the budding tragedy way before it comes upon the ten-year-old. Very soon in the novel, the children start to notice that their environment is changing. New building sites and streets gradually start to dominate the children’s domain: The barn was surrounded by skeleton houses. The road outside was being widened and there were pyramids of huge pipes at the top of the road, up at seafront. The road w