Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island” has been viewed as a psychological drama in which Heaney explores alter-egos that he might have become. Such an approach becomes more complicated if we consider that the stage of the drama is Ricoeurian typology of mnemonic phenomena where the narrator “I” is splitted into the subject in the process of recollection and the self fixed in the pure memory. According to Paul Ricoeur, the epistemological process of recollection involves the evocation of past memories at the present moment, so that the subject-in-recollection imagines the self fixed in the pure memory to be “the other than self” and relives past memories as if real. In this sense, Ricoeur argues that memory exists in the typology of
mnemonic phenomena as memory-images and that the subject-in-recollection tend to imagine the past in the way he can satisfy his desire. Likewise, in “Station Island” Heaney’s narrator “I” re-imagines his past memories as if they were memory-images and re-lives past feelings as “the other than self.” By becoming “the other than self” in the process of recollection, he reviews the burden of a national poet and finally accepts the limitation of his fellow Irish people as well as his own self.
For Heaney, accepting the limitations and scars as they are becomes the foundation for love, friendship, and goodness toward his people because it lets him realize reasons for the necessity of co-dependency and reciprocity.

• 한지희(국립경상대학교) | Han, Jihee