Chapter 14 - Violence, Trauma, Recovery

Summary

The violence that infected the North during the decades of the Troubles was represented in a variety of forms as a generation of writers attended to how its intertwined narratives on both sides of the sectarian divide were articulated as shared experiences of national trauma in dire need of understanding and representation through the language of literature. Beginning with Seamus Heaney’s reflections in ‘Cessation 1994’ on the overwhelming difficulties but also undeniable opportunities of envisaging pathways of historical, political, and economic recovery on the eve of the Belfast Agreement, this chapter proceeds by reading Patrick McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto and Edna O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs as two novels that continued the unfinished work in Irish literature after 1998 of representing the traumas of violence from national and global perspectives (and thus not only in the Irish context of the Troubles).