Days Without End (2016) - Sebastian Barry

 The novel follows Irish immigrant Thomas McNulty, in the 19th

century, through an America in the process of its own making and
depicts the process by which, as McNulty escapes the violence of
the Old World, he becomes complicit in the foundational violence of
the New World (the expansion of the America frontier).

 In an interview, Barry defines his protagonist’s role, as “dispossessing

people like his own people” (LEA, 2017)

 Told in retrospective memory of an old soldier, McNulty’s narration

opens with a scene of a preparation of a corpse to be put on a cheap
coffin in 1851 when he “engaged in the business of war”(Barry, p.1),
then he moves to his traumatic immigration to America, to his early
experiences cross-dressing for miners in Daggsville with his partner
John Cole, whom he met by chance under a hedge in Missouri, and
then on to their enlistment in the US army in 1850s. Thomas and
John fought in the Indian Wars and in the Civil War.
 Days Without End (2016) - Aspects presented
Sebastian Barry’s treatment of history in his fiction:

“His project is one of recovery – stitching back into the torn fabric of Irish history the anomalous figures from an
extended Irish family” (Roy Foster, 1998, vi).
“Barry, in retrieving these lost souls of his own family, is also writing back into the story of Ireland those parts of
it which our nationalist master-narrative has most signally left out, the pieces of our past that do not fit with the
way we want to imagine our history” (Nicholas Grene, 2006, 169).

“Well, the whole adventure of my books, indeed, has been to try and go and find, if only in the imagination,
these bits and bobs of my family, the people who weren't talked about, the people who - around whom a
silence fell, whether for political reasons or because they went so far and never came home.” (Barry, 2017)

“you wonder then about the sadness and the sorrow - historical sorrow of an Irish person, himself essentially a
native person, an aboriginal person, by a great trauma having to go to America, joining an army that was
engaged in the destruction, erasure and removal of a people, the Native American people, not unlike himself.
[…] So my task was to follow, and in this instance, follow a person like that to America. (Barry, 2017)
 The violence of both the Indian wars and the Civil War is shown in a bloody narrative which exposes tragic
historical realities in tandem with the tenderness of male-to-male love and communion shared in everyday
war experiences in the West. There is hope and a happy ending:

“I never felt such joy of heart as in those days traipsing southward. I never felt such pure charge and fire of joy. I am like
a man not just let loose from death but from his own discomfited self. I don’t desire nothing but to reach our farm and
witness the living forms of John Cole and Wynona step out to meet me. […] That’s how it was. It were only a short
stretch of walking down through those pleasing states of Missouri and Tennessee.” (Barry, 258).

 Barry interrogates history, the participation of Irish in American genocidal wars, in the American Civil War,
when the Irish fought in both sides, depending on the port they got to, if the Confederation or the Union, in
exchange for money and citizenship, and also challenges the imaginary construction of the frontier and the
American West.

 Barry reflects upon interwoven narratives of self and nation, race, gender, illusion and reality. He uses scenes
of gender and racial disruption to question the wider hierarchies at work in the nineteenth century American
West, and the problematic duality of gender, male/female; sexuality, straight/gay; and race, white/other,
portraying an individual story of self-discovery and the redemptive power of love.
 Attacking a Native American village
“We saw the shapes of Indians and stabbed them with our bayonets. We worked back and forth through
the bodies and tried to kill everything that moved in the murk. Two, three, four fell to my thrust, and I was
astonished not to be fired on, astonished at the speed and the horror of the task, the exhilaration of it, my
heart now racing but burning in my breast like a huge coal. I stabbed and I stabbed. I saw John Cole
stabbing, I heard him grunting and cursing. We wanted the enemy stilled and destroyed so that we could
live ourselves.” (Barry, p.31)

“Then all the work seemed done and all we heard then was the crying of survivors, the terrible groaning of
the wounded. The smoke cleared and we saw at last something of our battlefield. Then my heart shrank in
its nest of ribs. It was just women and children all around us. Not a brave among them.” (Barry, p.31)

“Wearily, wearily, we walked back. […] We didn’t for those moments know our names. We were different
then, we were other people. We were killers, like no other killers that had ever been. […]There didn’t seem
to be anything alive, including ourselves. We were dislocated, we were not there, now we were ghosts.”
(Barry, p.32-33)
 Fluidity of gender
“Funny how as soon as we hove into those dresses everything changed. I
never felt so contented in my life. All miseries and worries fled away. I
was a new man now, a new girl. I was freed, like those slaves were freed
in the coming war. I was ready for anything” (Barry, p.10).

“I guess she might be fifteen years, my daughter, but who can say. I call
her my daughter though I do know she ain’t. […]A daughter not a
daughter but who I mother best I can” (Barry, p.235-236)

“I feel a woman more than I ever felt a man, though I were a fighting man
most of my days.” (Barry, p.233)
Sebastian Barry questions constructed identities - national/personal

“The point is, we were nothing. No one wanted us. Canada was a-feared of us. We were a plague. We
were only rats of people. Hunger takes away what you are. Everything we were was just nothing then.
Talk, music, Sligo, stories, future, past, it was all turned to something very like the shit of animals.”
(BARRY, 2016, p.25)

“In the army you meet a dozen men a month came from Ireland but you never hear them talk about it
much. You know ‘a’ Irishman because he has it ‘writ’ all over him.” (BARRY, 2016, p.23).

“Being from Ireland means you are born double, capable of being angel and devil “both the same”:
“you’re talking to two when you talk to one Irishman” (BARRY, 2016, p.23).

“How we were able to see slaughter without flinching. Because we were nothing ourselves, to begin
with. We knew what to do with nothing, we were at home there. […] I love my father when I was a
human person formerly. Then he died and I was hungry and then the ship. Then nothing. Then America.
Then John Cole. John Cole was my love, all my love.” (BARRY, 2016, p.25).
 Difficulties soldiers faced
“We were four or five days from the frontier, we reckoned, just a bit of a ride now to Missouri and what we called
home, when a storm came in over us. It was one of those bleak ice storms, everything it touched freezing, including
the bits of our bodies showing. I never rode in anything so cold. We had nowhere to shelter and so were obliged to
push on.” (BARRY, 2016, p.52)

“After the first day the storm decided to go worse. It made the world into a perpetual night but when the real night
came the temperature was maybe down to forty minus, we didn’t know exactly. Our blood said the bottom of the
scale. It’s a queer wild feeling, that freezing. We laid neckerchiefs across our mouths and chins but after a while little
good it did.” (BARRY, 2016, p.52)

“Our gloves froze and soon our fingers were fixed fast around the reins like our hands had deceased and gone to their
reward. Couldn’t feel them which was maybe just as well. The wind was all icy blades and might have shaved the
beards and whiskers of the mean but that they had already froze to metal. We all went white, frosted from our
crowns to our toes, and the black, the grey, and brown horses were all turned white now. The blankets of chill white
rheum over everything was not warming. Picture us, two hundred men riding into that wind”. (BARRY 2016, p.52)
 Bibliography
BARRY, Sebastian. Days Without End. Faber and Faber, 2016.
CAMPBELL, Neil. “The seam of something else unnamed: Sebastian Barry Days without End.” Western American Literature. Vol 53, number 2, 2018.
p.231-252.
EMMONS, David M. Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West 1845– 1910. University of Oklahoma, 2010.
EVANS, Kate. “Sebastian Barry’s New Novel Days Without End.” Interview with Sebastian Barry. 22 Jan. 2017. Australian Radio (ABC) online.
www .abc .net.au/radionational/programs/booksplus/sebastian- barrys - new - novel- days- without - end /8115364.
Foster, Roy. Introduction. Our Lady of Sligo. By Sebastian Barry. London: Methuen, (1998), v-xii.
GRENE, Nicholas. “Out of History: from The Steward of Christendom to Annie Dunne.” Mahony 167-182
HUGHES, Howard. The American Indian Wars. Herts: Pocket Essentials, 2001.
IGNATIEV, Noel. How the Irish Became White. Routledge, 1995.
LEA, Richard, and Sian Cain. “Sebastian Barry on His Costa- winning novel Days Without End— Books Podcast.” Guardian Books podcast, 3 Feb.
2017, www.theguardian .com /books /audio /2017 /feb /03 /sebastian - barry - on - his - costa- winning - novel - days - without - end - books - podcast.
Mahony, Christina Hunt, ed. Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry. Dublin: Carysfort, 2006.
Mullen, Mary L. “How the Irish Became Settlers: Metaphors of Indigeneity and the Erasure of Indigenous Peoples.” New Hibernia Review / Iris
Éireannach Nua, vol. 20, no. 3, 2016, p. 81–96. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44807215. Accessed 29 May 2023.
Rodgers, Thomas G. 2008. Irish-American Units in the Civil War. New York: Bloomsbury