Empire and the Great War - rethinking Irish identity in Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way
Empire and the Great War - rethinking Irish identity in Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way

Summary/Abstract: The staggering, unprecedented scale of human losses and other repercussions of what became the First World War continue to inspire many authors of fiction and nonfiction. The individual and collective fates of people caught in the traumatic years of the Great War also speak of the tensions created by imperial politics and issues of loyalty to a monarch, country, or family. In the case of the Irish in this war, their tragic experiences fighting "for King, country and empire" have been retrieved in a substantial manner through scholarly reexamination and literary descriptions only in the last couple of decades. Among such texts is also Sebastian Barry's novel A Long Long Way (2005), that depicts the sufferings of Irish servicemen in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, who first fight the enemy on the Western Front and then receive an order to turn their weapons on Irish rebels against British rule in their own hometown during the Easter Rising. Drawing on critical readings, including those from Irish and memory studies, this paper analyzes the tragic challenges of Irish identity that is transformed in the First World War and symbolically represents the profound crisis of the Irish sense of belonging exemplified in Barry's novel.

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