Second Sight as Narrative Technology

I. A Craft Problem Disguised as a Theme

Critics who encounter Aiden Glencar’s “second sight” in Give Them Unquiet Dreams are tempted, reasonably, to read it as thematic material: an inheritance of Irish folk belief, a metaphor for queerness and difference, a register through which grief for the dead stays commutable with love for the living. All of these readings are available in the text and none of them is wrong. But treating second sight only as theme risks missing what it is doing at the level of craft. Aiden’s visions, his conversations with his dead grandfather, and his intermittent access to other people’s thoughts are not simply content the novel is “about” — they are a technology the novel uses to solve a structural problem common to any first-person coming-of-age narrative: how does a single, temporally bound consciousness gain access to information — future outcomes, other people’s interiority, events before its own birth — without breaking the rules of its own point of view? This essay reads second sight as Mulhern’s answer to that problem: a license, built into the ontology of the novel’s world, that permits foreshadowing without authorial cheating, compresses decades of family history into scenes a child narrator can plausibly witness, and dissolves the boundary between past, present, and future that a strictly realist first-person narration would otherwise have to respect.

II. The Block of Wood: A Novel’s Time-Theory Made Explicit

Mulhern does something unusual for a literary novel: he has a character state the book’s temporal logic outright, in terms nearly indistinguishable from a physics thought experiment. Aiden’s grandfather, appearing as a ghost at the foot of the boy’s bed, produces an image: “Look at this block of wood… The front represents the future; the middle is the present; and the back part… is the past.” When Aiden asks what this means, his grandfather explains: “That’s life. Eternity. There is no division between the past, present, and future; there is rather a single existence. Our brains can’t handle everything happening at once.”¹ This is, functionally, a statement of eternalism — the “block universe” view in which all moments of time are equally real and equally present, and where a mind capable of surveying the whole block, rather than experiencing it serially, would have no privileged “now.” The grandfather makes the narrative payoff explicit: “your consciousness is like a small flashlight that can only shine on one part of the block at a time.”¹

This is not decoration. It is the operating rule that licenses everything else the novel does with time. Once a reader accepts that Aiden’s grandfather — and, by extension, Aiden and Laura, who share “the gift” — can shine that flashlight on parts of the block a normal consciousness cannot reach, the novel has earned the right to move freely between the traumatic Irish backstory of Catherine’s mother’s death by drowning in a well, decades before Aiden’s birth, and the present-tense Boston narrative of Aiden’s own adolescence, without needing a framing device, an omniscient narrator, or a structural break. Second sight is, in other words, a portable point-of-view exemption. It lets a first-person child narrator carry material that first-person child narrators are not supposed to be able to carry.

III. Foreshadowing Without Cheating: The Shimmerer and Hope Gallagher

The craft risk of any foreshadowing device is that it can feel like authorial intrusion — the writer visibly arranging dominoes rather than the character perceiving them. Mulhern’s solution is to make the foreshadowing diegetic: it happens to Aiden, inside the story, rather than being smuggled in through narratorial hindsight. When Aiden asks his grandfather’s ghost about a “blond lady” he has glimpsed at school, the grandfather answers within the novel’s established supernatural taxonomy: “We call her a shimmerer. A good soul who has passed. Before she completes her journey, she has something she wants to accomplish.” Aiden immediately connects her to a living classmate: “Hope Gallagher?” “Yes, son.” “Why does she need to watch over her?” “You’ll find out.”¹

The scene does two things simultaneously that a conventional realist narration cannot do at once. First, it plants a Chekhov’s gun (Hope Gallagher will matter later) without the narrator needing to signal narratorial awareness of the plant — Aiden is genuinely puzzled, not knowingly withholding information from the reader for effect, because the “gift” gives him fragments, not full sight. Second, it dramatizes the withholding as the grandfather’s choice (“You’ll find out”) rather than the author’s, converting an authorial technique (deferred revelation) into a character trait (a ghost who teaches by riddle, in the tradition of the seanchaí or folk storyteller). The device recurs throughout the novel: Aiden sees “a vision” of “a girl… wearing a green pinafore, her scarf caught on a branch,”¹ long before that image’s significance to the family’s Irish history is unpacked; Laura’s obsessive drawing of the “ghost man” precedes, by chapters, the revelation of who he actually is. In each case, the information arrives to Aiden — and therefore to the reader — as partial, uninterpreted sense data, exactly the epistemic position a reader wants to occupy in a mystery structured around inherited trauma.

IV. Compression: Three Generations in One Boy’s Bedroom

Second sight also solves a scale problem. Give Them Unquiet Dreams is, among other things, a three-generation family history — Sinead’s death in Ireland, Catherine’s guilt and immigration, Laura’s breakdown and institutionalization, Aiden’s own adolescence — compressed into a roughly 264-page novel narrated by a teenager. A conventional realist novel attempting this scope would need either a multi-generational omniscient narrator (sacrificing the intimacy of first person) or extensive exposition delivered through dialogue (risking inertness). Mulhern instead uses the grandfather’s nightly visitations as a compression device: each visit delivers, in a few pages of dialogue at the foot of a child’s bed, information that would otherwise require entire chapters of backstory. The story of Sinead’s death by the well — the novel’s foundational trauma — is delivered twice, once by the grandfather in Chapter Two (“A horse startled her and she fell into a well… before, she heard banshees calling out to her”)¹ and once later, with more emotional detail, by Rita in the Public Garden.¹ The doubling is deliberate: the ghost’s version is folkloric and compressed (banshees, púcas, a horse “with golden eyes”), suited to a bedroom visitation that must also cover cosmology, family history, and moral instruction in the same scene; Rita’s version is naturalistic and detailed, suited to a scene whose purpose is emotional reckoning rather than world-building. Second sight allows Mulhern to deliver the same core information twice, in two different registers, without redundancy — because the first telling is doing structural work (establishing the supernatural rules and compressing the timeline) that the second telling, freed from that burden, does not need to repeat.

V. The Epistemological Wager: Protecting the “Rational” Story

The novel’s central practical plot — Aiden and Martin’s campaign to get their mother Laura released from the psychiatric hospital — depends entirely on a distinction the grandfather names explicitly: the difference between what is true and what is permitted to look sane. “If Laura does something that others think peculiar, you must protect her. Make her actions seem rational,” the grandfather tells Aiden. “They’re afraid when things don’t fit their idea of reality… their vision is limited.”¹ This line does triple duty. Thematically, it names the novel’s argument about the social construction of madness — Laura is not unwell, she is unwitnessed, surrounded by people whose “vision is limited” in the ordinary sense, in ironic counterpoint to Aiden’s literal second sight. Structurally, it hands Aiden — and the reader — a concrete dramatic task (protect Mom by managing her presentation) that converts an abstract supernatural gift into stakes-bearing plot machinery. And technically, it lets Mulhern write scenes of apparent domestic realism (family therapy meetings, a school suspension, a hospital visit) that carry a second, ironic layer of meaning available only to readers who share Aiden’s privileged knowledge that the “crazy” version of events is the accurate one. Margie’s blunt affirmation late in the same sequence — “I think she sees things that other people don’t” — voiced by a minor character with no supernatural stake in the matter, quietly seeds doubt into the “rational” consensus from the outside, confirming that Aiden’s technology of sight is bleeding, plausibly, into the ordinary world.¹

VI. Conclusion: Second Sight as Formal Solution

To call Aiden’s second sight a narrative technology is not to diminish its thematic weight — grief, inheritance, and the stigmatization of difference are not incidental to the device but are what the device is built out of. The claim is rather that Mulhern has found, in Irish folk cosmology, a structural solution to problems that a purely secular realist novel narrated by a fourteen-year-old would have to solve by other, clumsier means: an omniscient narrator, flashback chapters, or expository dialogue. Second sight lets the novel foreshadow through the character’s own uninterpreted perception rather than the narrator’s hindsight; it lets three generations of Irish-American history compress into bedside conversations with a ghost; and it converts an epistemological claim about the reality of the supernatural into the engine of the novel’s most conventional plot, the fight to bring a mother home. The device is at once the novel’s most fantastical element and its most disciplined formal choice.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays Unreliable Child Narrators → The Confessor Archetype