Introduction

Construction of Identity in Northern Irish Novels 225
terrible irony evoked by the theme of betrayal. Cultural and political identity, the
very means by which the nation-state is to be established, becomes the greatest
liability for the members of the state” (ibid. 70). As an example he gives
O’Flaherty’s “The Sniper”, which I would like to mention here, too, as it shows an
interesting parallel to Deirde Madden’s One by One in the Darkness. “The Sniper”
tells the story of a republican sniper who finally kills his strongest rival who in
turn is a Free State sniper. What he then discovers is quite disturbing as he has
actually killed his own brother (ibid. 70). One by One in the Darkness retells the story
of the destruction of family bonds due to taking political stands as already shown
in chapter 3.2. While father Charlie is quite reasonable and against violence, his
brother Brian sympathises with the IRA and is also a member of Sinn Féin. One
day Charlie sits in his brother’s kitchen waiting for him when a Protestant commando
attacks the house and kills him mistakenly. The family is traumatized after
that and Brian has to live with the guilt that he should have died instead of his
brother. These two examples show well that history seems to be repeating itself
continuously. What happened during the civil war in Ireland occurred again
roughly eighty years later in Northern Ireland.
Besides these many similarities writers of the latter half of the twentieth century
work with many distinctive methods as well. In contrast to those writers who
were born and worked before the recurring Troubles of the 1960s-1990s, a
younger generation of writers has been trying to reconfigure “accepted notions of
what constitutes the individual and his world” (Kennedy-Andrews 2003, 92). Similarly
to Patten, Kennedy-Andrews names dislocation, fragmentation and reconfigurations
of the postmodern era as decisive attributes of the younger writers’
works (Patten called attention to ambiguity, displacement, and perspectivism) and
thus groups authors such as McLiam Wilson and Madden in the realm of postmodern
humanism, “a world in which diverse cultures and symbols are flowing
together in curious ways” (ibid. 92).
Multiperspectivity is an inherent characteristic of Eureka Street and One by One
in the Darkness. The equal division of story-telling between Protestant Chuckie
Lurgan and Catholic Jake Jackson in Eureka Street already hints at the fact that
there is always more than one point of view. Furthermore, it seems to make sense
to give a voice to both Protestant and Catholic residents. Chuckie and Jake do not
remain the only characters who the reader is given insight to, however. Republican
and unionist views are also presented through Aoirghe Jenkins and Ronnie Clay
whose racism and hate against everything that is not white and Protestant has
been already mentioned in chapter 3.2 (see p. 218). One by One in the Darkness gives
a comparable amount of different perspectives. Besides the three sisters and their
mother Emily who tell the story through flashbacks and present events other (political)
views are shown through Charlie Quinn and his brothers or for example
the two nuns Sister Philomena and Sister Benedict who are teaching at Helen’s
school. In Where They Were Missed the reader finds only one narrator in the form of