Examples Of Obscurity In Milkman

In her 2018 novel Milkman, Anna Burns masterfully uses the language of obscurity to illuminate deep truths regarding both the novel’s characters and the sociopolitical atmosphere of Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Burns achieves this through the narration of middle sister, the protagonist, and how her point of view directly parallels the experiences of her community. It is through both middle sister’s and the community’s responses to the issues of the Troubles that Burns comments on the Northern Irish people and what they must have faced during this time. More specifically, the lack of specific names within the text, whether regarding people, places, or things, as well as the “memory lapses” that both middle sister and the community come

Throughout the novel, most of the people middle sister interacts with are given descriptions based on how they relate to either middle sister or the community, rather than an actual name. The first sentence of the book is an example of this impersonal and detached way that middle sister interacts with everything and everyone around her: “[t]he day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died” (Burns 1). From the outset, we see a strange and eerie avoidance of specific details. This is further seen in how middle sister describes the people closest to her, such as her “maybe-boyfriend” or her “eldest sister” (Burns 8,1). This technique indicates the lack of intimacy between characters, or the intentional distance that middle sister wishes to put between herself and those around her. However, it is not just the names of people that middle sister withholds from us, it is the names of places and things as well. A clear example of this is when middle sister describes the inappropriate interactions she has with first brother-in-law. She states that “[h]e made lewd remarks about me to me from the first moment he met me—about my quainte, my tail, my contry, my box, my jar, my contrariness, my monosyllable” (Burns 1). Here again there is a use of descriptive words that never grants a specific name to the reader. From this example, we can see that middle sister’s aversion to specificity is a reaction to a traumatic memory—that of first brother-in-law's inappropriate sexual advances when middle sister was a child. This showcases a pattern in middle sister’s detachment from details as a way of coping with the many traumatic experiences she faces, and I believe it is a comment on how many people during this time