For the boy, knowing himself requires knowing and situating himself in his family’s history and Ireland’s history, both of which prove to be elusive. The story is concerned with the complexities of how we know, particularly how we know ourselves. He uncovers only a partial picture of the truth as he tries to put together the tragic, mysterious past of his family. The image of reading in the dark expresses the difficulty of reconstructing the past from fragmen tary accounts available in the present: the narrator’s family history “came to in bits, from people who rarely recognized all they had told” (236). The novel takes its title from a scene in which the boy, after the lights are turned off, tries to imagine the story he had been reading. As the boy stumbles through the complexities and ironies of the adult world, he slowly increases in social and politic al awareness. In Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, Deane presents us with the childhood of an unnamed narrator who tells the story of his troubled family in postwar Northern Ireland.
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