Milkman, the winner of the 2018 Booker Prize, displays the repressive nature of people’s lives in Northern Ireland during the Troubles in the 1970s through the sexual harassment suffered by the protagonist. This paper will use “in-betweenness,” “permanent liminality” and “communitas” as keywords to analyze the liminality of Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Based on the analysis of in-betweenness and permanent liminality, and inspired by O’Brennan (2023), this paper points out that Northern Ireland in the 1970s was a liminal space. As the kernel of society and the key to survival, liminality is the condition of in-betweenness. Fortunately, what is conciliative is that communitas is formed in the course of liminality, through which people help each other and work together to survive and fight back in a dark society. This paper gives a relationship model of the keywords, stressing that although communitas is the smallest part, it is a supporting force. The analysis of the paper not only fills in the lack of liminal research in the existing studies of Milkman, but also provides a historical reference for Northern Ireland, which is still in liminality today.
Jingting Fu (Wed,) studied this question.