The Gathering

“It does not matter. I do not know the truth, or I do not know how to tell the truth. All I have are stories, night thoughts, the sudden convictions that uncertainty spawns. All I have are ravings, more like.”

Because Veronica doesn’t know certain truths about her family’s past, she writes them in this novel as a way of coming to terms with the past. Veronica wants to understand the past, which she can’t because she has “ravings,” not “convictions.” Veronica writes a story where there is an absence of fact because she hopes to make sense of Liam’s death by suicide. This quote speaks to the power of storytelling and The Complexity of Memory.

“And, in fact, this is the tale that I would love to write: history is such a romantic place, with its jarveys and urchins and side-buttoned boots. If it would just stay still, I think, and settle down. If it would just stop sliding around in my head.”

This quote highlights that history is a constructed narrative that is sentimental and therefore comforting. Veronica wants her history to be equally neat, but there is too much unknown and too much chaos in her family’s past. This quote emphasizes how difficult it is to write a history about the past that is both true and well packaged.

“There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important […] There are so few people given us to love and they all stick.”

Enright’s novel is about family and love—love lost and love had. This quote reinforces the importance of love and the value of human relationships.

“I wonder how you might undo all these sheds and extensions, take the place back to the house it once was. If it would be possible to unbuild it all and start again.”

In this quote, the house is used as a metaphor for reclaiming the past. House and home are meant to shelter a family, to keep them safe, together, and happy. But Veronica’s associations with her childhood home are more complicated. If the home is symbolically the structure of a family, then what Veronica really wants to do is rebuild her family and start again so that Liam might not die by suicide.

“It seems like such a massive waste of energy—and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love anymore. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.”

This quote captures one of the essential facts of the human experience. Human beings inherently love, and it is also inevitable that humans die. Despite the pain of death and loss, humans love anyway. This speaks to the inherent power of love, and the ways in which love can help people avoid spinning out about their mortality. This is important in the novel because Veronica struggles with both grief and the love that made that grief possible.

“You might think there is something light about the dead—our lives feel so heavy to us, sometimes—but the dent Charlie’s head made in the pillow was living and deep.”

The dent in the pillow depicted in this quote is a metaphor for the heaviness of the human experience. Even in death, the impact that the mutual joy and conflict of the human experience is still evident. This quote questions the idea that death is a release from the complexity of life.

“I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them, instead.”

In this quote, family is a metaphor for the projection of our own identities. Families are so intertwined that we “live in them” because they are integral to our sense of self. This is an important metaphor for Veronica’s character development, as she is tied to her family because she is formed by them, even if that fills her with resentment.

“This is where the silence happened—as I stood in the back room and looked out at the garage and the lane. It was an overwhelming silence, like the air was made of wood, and the bulbous flowers of the back-room wallpaper both writhed a little and were entirely still, under my eight-year-old eye.”

This quote captures a formative moment in Veronica’s character development: the moment she realizes, as an eight-year-old, that she has been abandoned by her parents. This is one of Veronica’s earliest experiences with abandonment. Even though her grandmother is good to her, the feeling of being left behind or unwanted by her parents is a trauma that follows her throughout her life.

“I do not know why Ada married Charlie when it was Nugent who had her measure. And thought you could say that she did not marry Nugent because she did not like him, that is not really enough. We do not always like the people we love—we do not always have that choice.”

In this quote, Enright explores the validity of autonomy. Ada decides as to whom she marries, but a rational decision is not always the best one. Ada makes a decision about love, which people don’t actually have a choice in. This implies that Ada’s choice has ramifications for decades because she went against her own nature.

“For someone who was blunderingly stupid most all of the time, my brother was very astute. And what he was astute about were other people’s lives, their weaknesses and hopes, the little lies they like to tell themselves about why and whether they should ever get out of bed. This was Liam’s great talent—exposing the lie.”

This quote characterizes Liam as brutally honest, inherently analytical, but also off-putting and socially awkward. Liam could analyze other people’s lives, but he had a harder time analyzing his own internal lies and external conflicts. Liam’s inability to practice self-reflection despite his intelligence about truth speaks to his level of mental health issues. This quote also explains why so many people avoided Liam, leading Liam to a lonely death by suicide.

“My own name, Veronica—an ugly enough thing I had always thought, it sounded like either the ointment or the disease—was one of her great favorites. St Veronica wiped the face of Christ on the road to Calvary and He left His face on her tea towel. Or the picture of His face. It was the first-ever photograph, she said.”

Veronica’s namesake is a fitting symbol of her own role in the novel. Just as St. Veronica had the “first-ever photograph,” Veronica’s narration and storytelling about her family history is her own effort to capture a photograph that can both honor and expose the truth about her family. What’s more, St. Veronica wipes way Christ’s sweat, a metaphorical parallel to the way in which Veronica helps her family deal with and manage Liam’s death.

“I have seen great bleakness in Liam’s eyes, on that day and on many days since—but when Nugent saw me, a small girl in a school uniform holding the knob of the door, the look in his eye was one of very ordinary irritation.”

This quote characterizes Nugent as evil and antagonistic. Nugent’s sexual abuse of Liam is not even merited a guilty or shocked look when Veronica finds them in the act. This suggests that not only is Nugent comfortable sexually abusing children in corners of the house, but also that he has no respect or regard for Veronica because she has no power to do anything about him.

“People are not mad, any more. The lunatics are just a residue of skin in these rooms; scratched off, or hacked off, or maybe just shed: a million flakes of skin, a softness under the floorboards, a quality of light.”

This quote highlights that society has changed in its attitude to and treatment of people with mental health problems. But the physical remains of the people who used to be ignored or abused by society for being labeled as “mad” are reminders of how dehumanized people have been throughout history. This quote again uses corporeality as a symbol of memory, dehumanization, and change.

“There are no markers, no separate grades. I wonder how many people were slung into the dirt of this field and realise, too late, that the place is boiling with corpses, the ground is knit out of their tangled bones.”

In this quote, Enright emphasizes the dehumanization of the human body and soul by society at large. By refusing the dead of St. Ita’s their individual graves, society sends a message that those people were of lesser value to society. The bones and corpses in this quote are a symbol of memory, dehumanization, and change.

“They have me by the thighs. I am gripped at the thighs by whatever feeling this is. A vague wind. It clutches at me, skitters between my clothes and my skin. It lifts every hair. It grazes my lip. And is gone.”

In this quote, Veronica is characterized through her relationship with corporeality. She is bearing witness to the forgotten dead because she feels their hands on her. The quickness of the sensation also suggests that Veronica is reminded, very specifically, of her own mortality. Other people, such as Liam, are dead, but Veronica is still alive; though this is an obvious sentiment, Veronica’s character development relies on her being able to process her own life and mortality in order to move through grief.

“History is only biological—that’s what I think. We pick and choose the facts about ourselves—where we came from and what it means.”

This novel is about returning to the past to make sense of the present. But looking back in the past, which is a personal form of history, is subjective. This quote highlights the process with which Veronica is mining her family history to cope with her grief and guilt over Liam’s death.

“This is what shame does. This is the anatomy and mechanism of a family—a whole fucking country—drowning in shame.”

The shame being referred to in this quote has a double meaning. Veronica feels shame that she didn’t tell anyone about Liam’s sexual abuse and therefore save him from Nugent. This shame is also a metaphorical collective shame for the country of Ireland, which grappled with serious accusations of abuse of children at the hands of priests for decades. This allusion emphasizes that the shame of a family is therefore a microcosm of the shame of an entire society.

“Now I know that the look in Liam’s eye was the look of someone who knows they are alone. Because the world will never know what has happened to you, and what you carry around as a result of it. Even your sister—your saviour in a way, the girl who stands in the light of the hall—even she does not hold or remember the thing she saw.”

In this quote, Enright uses the “light of the hall” as a symbol for revelation. Clarity about Liam’s death comes from remembering witnessing his sexual abuse. But because Veronica didn’t help Liam at the time, she metaphorically turns away from the light, from the secret revealed. Thus, Veronica holds herself responsible as one of the central figures in Liam’s life who left him alone. This quote also characterizes Liam as traumatized and lonely.

“I thought […] that I was living my life in inverted commas. […] And I didn’t seem to mind the inverted commas, or even notice that I was living in them, until my brother died.”

The metaphor of the inverted commas suggests a falsity in the way Veronica has been living her life. Liam’s death forces her to confront that falsity. This falsity is developed as a defense mechanism against the traumas she and Liam experienced as children. This quote therefore demonstrates a major moment in Veronica’s character development.

“And it occurs to me that I wasn’t the only one who tried to save Liam—this man tried too, and this man, stuck out on his farm in Maherbeg, will always feel guilty that he did not succeed. The word ‘suicide’ is in the air for the first time—the way we all failed. So, thanks Liam. Thanks a bunch.”

The Hegarty family is collectively traumatized by Liam’s death by suicide. This trauma bonds them in ways they don’t want to be. This quote emphasizes Veronica’s anger and resentment at Liam for his death. It also reveals that Veronica, despite her feelings of guilt, is willing to give herself and others compassion because ultimately, it wasn’t their fault that Liam died.

“Because a mother’s love is God’s greatest joke. And besides—who is to say what is the first and what is the final cause?”

Veronica’s own role as a mother inspires her to continue with her life despite her grief and guilt. She sees value in life because she is a mother. Watching her own mother deal with Liam’s death is difficult for Veronica because she resents her mother for the choices she made throughout her life, such as having too many children and sending Veronica away. Here, Veronica refers to a mother’s love as “God’s greatest joke” because motherhood is an experience that is based on an oxymoron: Motherhood is both intensely beautiful and painful.

“Because there are effects. We know that. We know that real events have real effects. In a way that unreal events do not. Or nearly real. Or whatever you call the events that play themselves out in my head. We know there is a difference between the brute body and the imagined body.”

This quote captures The Complexity of Memory. Memory is tricky and fickle, but it is important to uncover the truth behind memories because real events have real consequences. This quote emphasizes Veronica’s internal conflict with memory. This quote also symbolizes the physical body as brute or imagined, and highlights that the difference between these types of bodies determines what happens in someone’s life.

“But I do not want a different destiny from the one that has brought me here. I do not want a different life. I just want to be able to live it, that’s all. I want to wake up in the morning and fall asleep at night. I want to make love to my husband again.”

This quote captures a major moment of Veronica’s character development. Through her grief and guilt over Liam’s death, Veronica has spent the novel trying to figure out the pieces of her life that don’t make her happy. Ultimately, she learns a valuable lesson: It’s not about changing the course of your life but about making what you do have in your life work towards your happiness. Veronica doesn’t want to change her life, but Liam’s death helps her learn that she can still live her life better than she has been.