Trauma and the Irish Experience: The Example of M. J. Hyland’s Carry Me Down

Abstract

The article analyses the philosophical features of M. J. Hyland’s novel Carry Me Down (2006), spotlighting this text in the epistemological paradigm of post-postmodernism. The analysis considers some of the distinctive features of the Irish novel in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, such as anticolonial explications and the smashed type of identity of the characters. Carry Me Down reveals the post-postmodern tendency of searching for the truth and explaining the nature of human beings as a combination of the humanitarian and the biophysical. The novel’s protagonist has a special superpower of detecting lies in the discourses produced by other characters. His inability to accept lies physically may be linked to the post-postmodern tendency of rejecting the hybrid combination of truth and untruth, typical of some kinds of postmodernist writing. The analysis also explores the representation of trauma in Hyland’s novel.