Violence and Postmemory in Glenn Patterson's Fat Lad

Glenn Patterson’s 1992 novel Fat Lad portrays Belfast as a city oscillating between destruction and reconstruction in the aftermath of partition and in the midst of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. While the novel centres on Drew Linden, a young Protestant man who returns to Belfast from England to confront both his familial and the communal past, the violent history of Belfast unfolds alongside the stories of three generations of the Linden family. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, this study argues that Fat Lad enacts the transmission of historical trauma through its portrayal of intergenerational inheritance within the Linden family while simultaneously exposing the asymmetries in the representation of Protestant and Catholic experiences. The novel’s multi-generational narrative structure discloses the mechanism through which violence and anxiety are inherited and reproduced across the Linden family. This study contends that the novel implicitly positions the Linden family’s Protestant experience as the norm through which Belfast is represented, leaving the persistent silence surrounding the Catholic experience to be read against it. Accordingly, this study argues that in a polarized society such as Northern Ireland, postmemory does not create a shared ground of affiliation between the two communities, but instead reveals the asymmetries that continue to characterize its transmission.