Inscape Volume 21 | Number 2 Article 6 10-1-2001 Irish Identity in Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark Peter Jasinski Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/inscape Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Jasinski, Peter (2001) "Irish Identity in Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark," Inscape: Vol. 21 : No. 2 , Article 6. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/inscape/vol21/iss2/6 This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Inscape by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact
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[email protected]. IRISH IDENTITY IN SEAMUS DEANE'S READING IN THE DARK Peter Jasinski n Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, Deane presents us with the Ichildhood of an unnamed narrator who tells the story of his troubled family in postwar Northern Ireland. As the boy stumbles through the complexities and ironies of the adult world, he slowly increases in social and political awareness. The novel takes its title from a scene in which the boy, after the lights are turned off, tries to imagine the story he had been reading. The image of reading in the dark expresses the difficulty of reconstructing the past from fragmen tary accounts available in the present: the narrator's family history "came to [him] in bits, from people who rarely recognized all they had told" (236). He uncovers only a partial picture of the truth as he tries to put together the tragic, mysterious past of his family.