Ulster's Paradise Lost: The 'Blind Bitter Fields' of Eugene Mc Cabe

Abstract

After giving a general introduction to the social, cultural, religious and political climate in Northern Ireland, the author comes to the central topic of this paper: Eugene Mc Cabe’s "Christ in the Fields". Mc Cabe’s trilogy, written between 1977 and 1979, is one of the works of literature which portrays Northern Ireland as a dangerous territory of fear and hatred and tries to tell us what it is like to live in a place like this. One of the most important features of Mc Cabe’s writing is the constant parallel between human and animal world: both are divided into two basic categories, the hunters and the hunted and since in Mc Cabe’s world there is no choice and no space for compromise, one either belongs to the first or is doomed to belong to the other. With his ability to universalize from the immediate particular Mc Cabe forces the reader to realize that the “blind bitter fields” of Northern Ireland are, in the end, a metaphor for the world and the human condition.