“All My Clean, White Bones:” Fragments and the Symbolism of Bones in The Gathering Claudia Excaret Santos Campusano College

The Gathering is a postmodern novel published in 2007, by Anna Enright. According to Liam Harte, “from the start, Enright’s fiction announced itself as [...] postmodernist” (Harte 218), and The Gathering is no exception. One of the main characteristics of postmodernist literature is fragmentation. The fragmentation in The Gathering resembles the bones in the text, which are working as a symbol for truth, identity, and trauma.

The Gathering is the story of Veronica and the Hegarty family. Veronica is the narrator, writing her memories or ideas of the past and present in order to go through the mourning of the death of her brother Liam and confess the trauma that he (and she) went through in her grandmother’s house. Bones are, per definition, parts, important but not self-sufficient elements of the human body. It is no coincidence that a text as fragmented as The Gathering pays so much attention to bones. This text is conformed of fragments in the same way that it is somehow based on bones. Bones, according to Allison Protas’ Dictionary of Symbolism, “are the last earthly traces of the dead, and seem to last forever: bones symbolize the indestructible life (it represents resurrection in Jewish tradition), yet also may represent...