Alice McDermott's Almost Invisible Narrators

Why do Alice McDermott's narrators not acknowledge a statutory rape and a murder? Why does she make it hard for readers to detect who her narrators are? She compels us to work with her to construct her stories and makes the task unusually hard for the first-time reader. Laszlo F. Földényi's collection of essays, Dostoyevski Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears (2020), helps us to understand the philosophical basis for McDermott's narrative strategies in her depictions of Irish America. Her narrators reveal the emptiness occasioned by a false dichotomy between subject and object – a contemporary disease. McDermott restores mystery as the antidote to systems of knowledge. Analysis of her novels, especially Child of My Heart (2002), Someone (2013) and The Ninth Hour (2017), suggests McDermott's cure for the narrators’ quest for control over the stories they tell. Someone is a key novel for understanding what ails our contemporary consciousness.