The Enigma Of Ghosts:Postcolonial Trauma In Seamus Deane’s Reading In The Dark

Reading in the Dark (1996) is a representative work of the contemporary Irish writer Seamus Deane. Set in Derry, Northern Ireland during the period from 1920s to 1970s, when the ethno-religious conflicts prevail, the novel depicts the traumatic past of a Northern Irish Catholic family through a boy’s exploration of the truth about his uncle’s mysterious death, and it also reflects the social and historical problems of Northern Ireland. Previous studies of the novel mainly focus on its postcolonial elements and the narrative techniques. Centering on the ghost images, this thesis explores the representations of the traumas embodied in the novel.The novel is full of ghostly presences such as Uncle Eddie’s mysterious death, the ghosts and fairies in Irish folktales, the fox succubae story and so on. It is notable that with the development of the novel the major characters take on a kind of ghostliness as a result of their inability to deal with the traumas effectively. With regard to the temporal settings, there are two kinds of ghosts in the novel:the ghosts of the past, and the ghosts of the present. By applying theories of trauma studies and postcolonial literature, this thesis aims to explore the relationship between the ghosts and the traumas in the novel within an Irish historical and cultural context. It argues that the ghosts in the novel not only represent the ineffaceable traumas deeply rooted in the history of Ireland as a colonized country, but also reflect how the traumas can mutate into new ones and continue to exert devastating effects.This thesis includes four parts. Part One gives an introduction to the novel, its historical background, and the previous criticisms on it; Part Two investigates the ghosts of the past, namely Uncle Eddie’s death, and the ghosts in the Irish folktales in the novel; Part Three explores the "ghosts" of the present, namely, those protagonists who embody ghostliness:the narrator’s mother, Crazy Joe, and the narrator himself, as to show how the death of Eddie continues exerting devastating effects on them. The last part is the conclusion, which wraps up the thesis and further elaborates on the relationship between the traumas and the ghostly images in the postcolonial context.