Silence on the Border in Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man and Brian McGilloway’s The Nameless Dead

Silence on the Border in Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man and Brian McGilloway’s The Nameless Dead

Since the North-South partition in 1921, Northern Ireland has been deeply influenced by the inter-state border and the border that divides the Catholic and Protestant communities within the state. Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man and Brian McGilloway’s The Nameless Dead depict the border’s two dimensions. The former shows the psychological boundary marked by silence during sectarian conflict, whereas the latter examines the temporal border drawn by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, a British-Irish-Northern Irish agreement that aimed to quell and end the conflict. Adopting Henri Lefebvre’s triad of spatial production and Slavoj Žižek’s conception of violence, the first part of this essay explains how, in Resurrection Man, objective violence is imposed on the space of Belfast through naming and how Victor Kelly, who finds himself spatially and socially marginalized, turns to serial killings (for Žižek, a form of subjective violence) to change his position within this order. Victor’s atrocities reinforce the silence of the city, which strengthens its communal boundaries as a result. The silenced border persists into the post-Agreement period. The second part of the essay illustrates how The Nameless Dead contrasts the spatial and temporal borders and underscores the impassability of the latter. Contrary to the inter-state border that can be secretly crossed, the temporal border drawn by the Agreement becomes the limbo that traps society in suspension and oblivion.