ABSTRACT
Mike McCormack has frequently articulated his sense of belonging to an Irish experimental tradition, specifically to both the twentieth-century innovators and a younger group of writers – including June Caldwell, Oisín Fagan, Rob Doyle, Claire Louise Bennet, and Danny Denton – whose work McCormack identifies as having rejuvenated the experimental pulse in Irish fiction. Flann O’Brien’s narrative voices similarly write-back against, and parody, mono-framed understandings of the real world of experience. The connection of Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones to the innovative tradition in Irish writing is apparent in numerous ways. The posthumous narrator, Marcus Conway, is initially unaware of his ontological status but progressively grows aware of what has happened to him, until a final moment of revelation radically transforms his ontological awareness. The perpetual life-driving rhythms that are given expression everywhere in the novel have a number of potent affects.
