Children of the Troubles: The Portrayal of Fragmented Identity and Experience in Contemporary Northern Irish Fiction

In this comps project, I explore how contemporary Northern Irish authors shed light on the effects of trauma as they portray the experience of living during the politically unstable period of the Troubles from the 1960s throughout the 1990s. Using fiction as a medium to express the traumatic nature of political violence on childhood experience in their novels, No Bones (2001), Ripley Bogle (1989), and Reading in the Dark (1996), authors Anna Burns, Robert McLiam Wilson, and Seamus Deane draw upon the literary techniques of discontinuous narrative structures, casual tone, and flashbacks. Using a combination of these techniques within the framework of a trauma narrative, the authors portray how their protagonists internalize violence from the Troubles as children and cope with the powerful ability of trauma to remind them of the past as adults. Ultimately, the authors mirror a sense of psychological trauma within their narratives and reveal a fragmented sense of identity and experience in Northern Irish adults