The Loss Of Community In Days Without An End

Days Without an End written by distinguished contemporary Irish novelist Sebastian Barry explores the common theme of rootlessness and wanderlust, which implicitly reflect “rites of passage” process as developed by the anthropologist Victor Turner, which involves separation, liminality, and communitas. By combining Sebastian Barry’s liminal writing with Turner’s theories of symbolic community and liminality, it becomes apparent that the protagonists are trapped in the rigid and static “permanent liminality” after experiencing series of changes in geographic space, psychological space, also the stagnation of memory space. The individuals, who are in a state of liminality, are unable to develop amid structural invisibility, absolute submission, and complete equality. The infinite potentiality and creativity that liminality offers lost and they never achieve community. The impotence to enter into the highly fluid and binding existential communitas signifies the loss of community as a reality