A Revisionist Reading of the American West in <i>Days Without End</i> by Sebastian Barry

Abstract

This essay aims to discuss the literary representation of an Irish immigrant in the American West in the nineteenth century, emphasizing the transnational, hybrid, and overlapping dimensions of cultures in that region, and investigating identity issues that are addressed in the novel, which deconstructs the traditional perspectives of masculinity, individualism, and romanticization of the expansion of American Frontier in the period. Thomas McNulty, protagonist of the Irish novel Days Without End (2016), by contemporary Irish writer Sebastian Barry, leaves the city of Sligo in Ireland to escape the Great Famine that victimized his family, and arrives in the United States in 1850, a period of expansionist violence and development of the American West as a space of conquest and opportunity for some and tragedy for others. Like hundreds of thousands of Irish people in the nineteenth century, Thomas served in the U.S. Army and became involved in the fighting against Native Americans and also in the American Civil War. Being a victim himself of starvation and of British colonization in his native country, his involvement in the American wars also makes him an aggressor, although we can draw connections between the plight of Irish immigrants in the region and the Native Americans.