Introduction

Construction of Identity in Northern Irish Novels 221
tions (see my introduction). What all three novels have in common is a very personal
narrative style that creates the impression of an eye-witness report of the
Troubles. In the terms of Gérard Genette and Franz K. Stanzel Where They Were
Missed features an autodiegetic first-person narrator, Saoirse Pentland. The first
eleven chapters deal with her childhood in a Protestant area of Belfast while the
following eleven chapters deal with her growing up in the Republic of Ireland.
The last three chapters are again set in the North when Saoirse for the first time in
ten years returns to her place of birth. One by One in the Darkness tells the story of
the three sisters Helen, Cate, Sally and their mother Emily. The fourteen chapters
are told by a heterodiegetic figural narrator with varying internal focalization. The
chapters are thus shown through the eyes of the four women and give impressions
of various stages of the past and the present, that is, from the 1960s onwards
to 1994, just before the start of the IRA ceasefires. Eureka Street presents
both a homodiegetic first-person narrator in the form of Jake Jackson and a heterodiegetic
figural narrator who relates the Chuckie Lurgan chapters. Of the nineteen
chapters sixteen are evenly distributed among Jake and Chuckie, whereas
chapters ten, eleven and twelve mark an exception as they deal with the city of
Belfast, a bomb explosion and the perception of its aftermath by different characters.
One of the reasons that make the re-evaluation of identity necessary is the colonial/postcolonial
aspect of both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
According to Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin a central theme of postcolonial literature
is the topic of place and displacement: “It is here that the special postcolonial
crisis of identity comes into being; the concern with the development or
recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place” (Ashcroft
8ff). As this paper only deals with Ireland and chiefly the North of it, dislocation
in the sense of some Irish migrating to faraway places like the United States of
America will not be discussed.
Out of the four major models of postcolonial literatures they mention (1. national
or regional models, 2. race-based models, 3. comparative models, 4. hybridity
and syncreticity models; see Ashcroft 15) the national and the hybridity/syncreticity
model are of special interest for Northern Ireland. While the USA
is considered as the first postcolonial society that created its own national literature,
other countries such as India, Nigeria or Australia followed this example and
started dealing with their own histories (Ashcroft 17). “The study of national traditions
is the first and most vital stage of the process of rejecting the claims of the
centre to exclusivity”, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin argue and they refer to the
Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka who saw in this the beginning “process of selfapprehension”
(ibid. 17). Whereas the earlier famous Irish writers such as Oliver
Goldsmith, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce or Samuel Beckett wrote in the
European and foremost in the British tradition, younger Northern Irish writers
like Glenn Patterson, Deirdre Madden, Robert McLiam Wilson or Seamus Deane