Eureka Street Literary Elements

Postmodernist novel/Irish fiction

Belfast, Northern Ireland in the 1990’s during a period of peace negotiations and cease-fires in the ongoing Irish civil war.

Reflecting its postmodern construction, the novel features multiple perspectives told by unreliable narrators offering conflicting narratives.

For the most part the tone is light while the mood is dark, creating a conflict which results in pervasive irony. After a horrific act of violence, the irony is leavened when the tone also briefly turns dark.

Protagonist: Jack Jackson, apolitical Catholic and his best friend Chuckie Lurgan, apolitical Protestant. Antagonist: the constant specter of sudden violence from either side waging constant war as part of “the Troubles.”

The struggle to existential normalcy versus the always lingering existential threat of becoming a random victim of the violence associated with a seeming irreconcilable political divide.

Although occurring about halfway through the novel, the Fountain Street Bomb effectively serves as the climax of the first half and the transformation of the novel into something more akin to meta-fiction.

N/A

Jake’s summing up the complex political and historical and social and cultural elements stimulating the never-ending violence in Ireland:” Eight hundred years, four hundred years, whatever way you wanted it, it was just lots of Irish killing lots of other Irish.”

Shague Ghinthoss was an inappropriately famous poet who looked like Santa Claus and wrote about frogs, hedges and long-handled spades” is a fiercely critical allusion to 1995 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Seamus Heaney.

The centerpiece of the novel is the Fountain Street Bombing and it is presented primarily through a variety of forms of imagery, including those moments just after the detonation and just before the hell that breaks loose as realization hits: “In the ringing, piercing silence of the aftermath of the bomb, there were a few moments of something grotesquely like peace. The dead were dead, many of the dying were unconscious, or incapable of speech, most of the injured and the terrified were in shock…An everyday, entirely forgettable, urban situation (any cafe, any shop, any pub, any street) explosively converted into a slaughterhouse.”

The graffiti showing up everywhere in conjunction with the bombing, OTG, is invested with a great meaning by an increasingly paranoid public. Ultimately, it is revealed that its power lies in the fact that it has no meaning at all or, paradoxically, could be interpreted to mean anything one wanted.

“The merest hour of the merest day of the merest of Belfast's citizens would be impossible to render in all its grandeur and all its beauty.”

“Ulster” is a common example of synecdoche used to refer to the entirety of Northern Ireland by pro-unionist members of the population and throughout the U.K.

In Chapter Ten, Belfast is personified throughout: “The city keeps its walls like a diary… The city feels how it feels to grow old… Belfast is a city that has lost its heart.”