Céad Míle Fáilte? Narratives of Hostility and Hospitality in Donal Ryan’s From a Low and Quiet Sea: Ethics and Aesthetics of Inclusivenes

Abstract

Ricœur (1992, 172) defined ethics as “aiming at a good life lived with and for others in just institutions.” Donal Ryan’s novel From a Low and Quiet Sea (2018) examines what this “good life” means while exploring human relationships in the contemporary Irish context, as it portrays characters who are in turn hospitable, hosted, hostile and victims of hostility. The novel focuses on human ambivalence and invites its readers to confront it along with the ethical questions thereby raised. It also points to the changing narratives of migration in Ireland in recent years, highlighting how matters of inclusiveness and exclusion are interlaced with stories and storytelling. This article thus examines the narratives of hostility and hospitality at work in From a Low and Quiet Sea and their correlation with both ethical and aesthetic preoccupations. It briefly reviews the character relationships on display, before focusing on Irish national identity and its narrative. Since, in the novel narrative choices shape the ambivalence of the dialectics of hospitality and hostility, it finally asks whether the text is a hostile or a hospitable one, examining how storytelling modes and intentions—which turn out to be at the core of the novel—are fundamentally linked to inclusiveness.