Readinf in the Dark

Readinf in the Dark: Traumatic Ethnicity and Family Therapy

Reading in the Dark is Seamus Deane’s historiographic account of the “uncreated Irish conscience” in the Northern Irish city Derry. The young narrator-protagonist in the novel is awakened to the divisive reality of the Irish people. It is the English colonialism that creates the psychology of the treachery among the Irish people. This essay mainly deals with the Irish dysfunctional family system in which Anglo-Irish politics involves family members in stressful emotional interdependency. In Reading in the Dark, Eddie’s execution ordered by the narrator’s maternal grandfather is a historical and family trauma causing all the family members to suffer from emotional distress in their own way. A main argument in this essay is that the Irish betrayal is an ethnic psychology produced when the Irish mind is contradictorily double-bound by the dictates of Irish nationalism and English colonialism.