Prophet Song

This section emphasizes the themes of The Power of the Family Unit and The Human Instinct for Survival. In Chapter 5, Eilish’s character develops as she deals with the increasing stress of her new reality. Eilish’s life was once happy but is now chaotic and full of uncertainty. Eilish’s firing from work is yet another hurdle in keeping her family safe and provided for. Lynch uses symbolism to highlight Eilish’s commitment to survival after coming to terms with a separation between her current reality and the past. As Eilish mines through her belongings, “An instant of feeling comes from each object and yet they contain nothing in themselves and she is done with them all, what are they but heirlooms, ornaments that live in darkened drawers” (151). By purposely removing meaning from objects that once held meaning, Eilish lets go of the past to survive in the present. Lynch highlights that in a society in which families are separated, people disappear, and the concept of truth no longer exists, the talismans that people use to make meaning of their lives don’t matter.

Accepting that Eilish can’t return to the past doesn’t make the unknowability of the future any easier. In a world as turbulent as this dystopian version of Ireland, Carole’s prolonged mental health crisis is paradoxically a level-headed way of reacting to heartbreak and chaos. This is depicted in her observation:

I awoke and began to see what they were doing to us, the brilliance of the act, they take something from you and replace it with silence and you’re confronted by that silence every waking moment and cannot live […] the silence doesn’t end because the silence is the source of their power, that is its secret meaning (164-65).

The “silence” referred to in this quote is both the silence of the state in hiding the truth about Carole’s husband and the metaphorical silence of her lack of autonomy. Carole’s revelation is also an important layer in Lynch’s message about the abuse of authority: Under an oppressive regime, the only thing that is knowable is that there is nothing to know.

Narrative structure shapes the novel’s tone and tension. Throughout the novel, the third-person limited point of view focuses on Eilish’s experience. Lynch’s run-on sentences mimic stream-of-consciousness prose, creating an urgent and frenzied tone. This prose style creates a parallel between the state of chaos in the country and the chaos in Eilish’s mind. In Chapter 6, Lynch escalates the violence of the war, which escalates the tension of the novel. While the characters hear this violence, much of it happens out of their sight. This narrative tension is therefore not released even when the rebel army frees Eilish’s neighborhood, because she doesn’t witness what happens—she still doesn’t know what the truth is, a hallmark of The Tyranny of Authoritarian Society.