The ethics of (un)grievable lives in Lucy Caldwell’s These Days

The Blitz, a series of German air raids that destroyed strategic towns in the UK during the Second World War, brought devastation and terror on a massive scale. Outside London, the Belfast Blitz was the most destructive in human and material terms, though its collective trauma has barely been debated in history books. Considering that literature can be instrumental in bringing to light gaps, silences or biased narratives of the past, this article focuses on Lucy Caldwell’s These Days (2022) as a memorialisation of those whose lives were erased from history and for its due tribute to the city of Belfast. Drawing on Butler’s Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2009), the present analysis will explore issues of vulnerability, precarity, and the ethics of grief in These Days in order to contend that Caldwell’s novel reveals how ungrieved and disposable lives were as much a consequence of the wreckage brought by the Second World War as of the erasure of collective memory from the official discourses of history.