Re-Imagining Tradition: Identity and Depictions of Ireland in Anne Enright’s The Green Road

Abstract

Despite attempts to label her a postnationalist writer, Anne Enright’s fiction is rooted in the Irish landscape geographically, psychologically and emotionally. Enright reimagines traditional places and charges them with new symbolic value. In The Green Road Enright uses a number of narrative techniques to question given notions of identity, both individual and collective. A postcolonial identity comes through in the novel and is mirrored by its narrative structure. This article will explore how non-linear narrative, interspersed with gaps in narrative continuity and memory, is a way of reimagining, rather than transcending, questions of nation and identity. It also sets out to analyse narrative strategies and depictions of Ireland and Irishness in the novel. This article will also look at how economy and monetary elements are embedded in the narrative and at how they might be seen as part of an attempt to describe Ireland and Irish identity.