Entangled in Story: Narrative Ethics of Memory in Contemporary Irish Fiction

Memory is not a static or innocuous representation of the past, but a continuing struggle over how best to understand, interpret, and communicate past events for present circumstances. This cultural preoccupation with the ethical work of memory has come to dominate the landscape of Irish fiction. Irish novels, written across a wide range of genres in the post-Celtic Tiger years, take on social, political, and cultural concerns about the way the past should be remembered. This thesis aims to investigate the way that conflicts of memory are depicted in contemporary Irish fiction, taking eight novels by eight different authors as case studies. I argue that these novels negotiate a narrative ethics of memory, whereby remembering as part of a community necessitates critical attention to, and responsibility for, the strategies used to construct, communicate, and respond to narratives about the past. The novel, as a complex narrative project, provides the ideal medium for thinking through the interrelation of multiple perspectives on the past, the communicative frameworks within which testimonies are produced and disseminated, and ethical concerns about aestheticizing painful histories. Through such narrative experiments, these authors explore the relationship between ways of telling the past and the creation of ethical environments for the present and future.