Political Rumination and Imagination in Anna Burns’s Milkman

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A clear argument for the ways middle sister’s silence functions as a reaction formation to violence and trauma, read through a Foucauldian lens, can be found in Marisol Morales-Ladrón’s “On docile bodies: silence, control, and surveillance as self-imposed disciplines in Anna Burns’ Milkman.”.

2 Burns admits to also practicing this unique habit in her youth: “I’d go into a shop or a cafe or a pub and someone would say: ‘Oh, you’re that girl who walks and reads.’ I used to think: ‘This is something to comment on?’ I wanted to write something about why people would comment on that” (qtd. in Hutton 352).

3 Most of the critical work on Milkman has focused on its unique narrational style. Patricia Malone notes that the novel’s “recursive narration” captures “the extraordinary difficulty of accessing self-knowledge under conditions of erasure and encroachment” (4); Siân White similarly argues that “[b]y setting the terms of her own language, she avoids settling for binaries that are inadequate for describing this world’s complexity” (121). In each of these cases, the digressive experimental style of narration Burns’s novel operates formally to challenge dominant narratives of the period and “assert a narrative credibility without replicating claims to absolute knowing and power she has come to mistrust” (118).