In my thesis, I will examine the aftermath of the trauma depicted by the novels, the role of memories in the narratives and the role they play in the protagonists’ present life. Two concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis, trauma and Nachträglichkeit will provide a background for this analysis. I will also focus on the special situation that Northern Ireland provides: the nearness of the individual and the communal, the personal and the political. I will discuss the tools that both novels use to express and refer to trauma, a phenomenon that essentially resists expression. And last but not least, I will write about the problematic role of language in these narratives and the way the difficulty of expressing and communicating traumatic events appears on the various levels of the texts.