These performative characteristics evoke parallels to classical theater in more obvious ways than most of the other characters. Moreover, Joe’s face is described “like a mask,” and he speaks with Shakespearean references. Like the blind prophet of Oedipus, Crazy Joe is described as “twirling walking stick.” (Deane 81) Although Crazy Joe isn’t blind, the walking stick conveys similar imagery. Ross compares Crazy Joe Johnson to Tiresias and the narrator’s mother to Jocasta correctly pointing out that both Tiresias and Crazy Joe Johnson show how “seeing and hearing too much” (Ross 37) lead to insanity, if not the perception of insanity. The most blatant parallel he mentions is between the characters of these texts.

In a brilliant rethinking of the Irish scene, Deane recognises how debilitating the image of the stereotypical Irish person as artist figure has been in Irish writing: the figure who is the romantically sensitive type, the spendthrift with words, an unthinking poet who creates unknowingly, unthinkingly, leaving the important act of understanding and interpretation to others.In “Oedipus in Derry: Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark,” Daniel Ross discusses the parallels between Reading in the Dark and Oedipus Rex. In this latter concern, the author is being true to his day job as one of the pre-eminent literary critics of his generation. In this manoeuvre, perhaps, can be discerned Deane's main preoccupation in Reading in the Dark namely, a meditation on the nature not only of how stories are made but also the centrality of the act of reading and interpretation. Amplifying this ambiguity is how Deane chooses to render his story through the conventions of the novel form and not as an autobiography or memoir, despite the story's genesis in reality and lived experience.

This uncertainty is central to the story itself with knowledge and knowing being the objects of desire in Deane's novel as his unnamed narrator searches for the truth at the heart of the secret that troublingly haunts his family.

It hovers elusively between numerous narrative genres – the ghost story, detective fiction, the Gothic, and Bildungsroman – never finally settling on any single one. (Christina Rossetti)Ĭonfusion is at the heart of Seamus Deane's (1940–) only novel, Reading in the Dark (1996). When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Reading in the dark seamus