Reading In The Dark By Deane
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Reading In The Dark By Deane
In his novel, Reading In the Dark, Seamus Deane tells the story of an Irish
Catholic family in Northern Ireland between the late Forties and early
Seventies. He traces the path taken by a growing boy searching for and finding
the truth about his family during this very tumultuous time and having to come
to terms with what he discovers. Deane uses this family to illustrate the issues
surrounding history that are central to the deeper understanding of his novel.
He shows how the British government's and the Catholic church's differing
agendas affect these people's history and the consequences of not dealing with
their history and past resulting in their subjugation and passivity. The theme
of haunting plays a major role in the history of this family and the overall
society of this people illustrating the problems of not confronting and not
knowing the past. The hauntings also further illustrate how various forms of
authority affect the way history is written and hidden. Deane begins the novel
with the haunting of the family's home which starts to hint at the importance of
history and the failure to deal with it. "'There's something between us. A
shadow. Don't move,'" (Deane 3). This is the first reference to there being
something dark and sinister to this family. The "shadow" here is the
ghost that haunts the family, but in fact represents the true history of the
family that has not been exorcised. By calling it a shadow, this brings up dark
and ominous connotations about what has happened in their past. This shadow is
also between the mother and son, a clear indication that the existence of it
keeps them apart emotionally. The secret of their history builds walls between
the members which will destroy the relationships among their family. "'No,
nothing, nothing at all…All imagination…There's nothing there," (Deane
4). The mother ignores the truth and fails to deal with it. She attempts to
ignore it by burying the past inside her. The truth about their history becomes
nothing more than a ghost in this family, festering inside those who know the
truth, but don't tell it, which in the long run will destroy themselves and
others around them. The house itself is haunted which is used by Deane to
illustrate the strength and affect of how history and the failure to deal with
it affects the surroundings around a person, in this case the family. We had a
ghost, even in the middle of the afternoon…The house was all cobweb tremors.
No mat...
The complete article is about 3076 words and 12.3 pages long.
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