This article examines how Sebastian Barry’s 2005 novel A Long Long Way explores the impact of the First World War in the construction of a sovereignty that is, against the grain of a teleological understanding of history, not incorporated in the official chronicle of the Irish independence from the British Empire. Through the lens of what I call ‘negative sovereignty’, which describes a form of agency that amounts to something less than nothing and is located in the obverse of the official historical record, I argue that the novel thematises the disruption caused by the war as a crisis in the hegemonic masculinity at the core of the national imagination. This article, thus, reads the novel’s protagonist, Willie Dunne, as a ‘queering’ subjectivity that embodies this kind of sovereignty, provoking a suspension in the patriarchal foundation of nation-building as symbolised by the severance of his relationship with his father.

本文探讨了塞巴斯蒂安·巴里（Sebastian Barry）2005年的小说《漫长的路》探究了第一次世界大战对建立主权的影响，这与对历史的目的论理解形成了鲜明的对照，但并未纳入爱尔兰脱离大英帝国的官方编年史中。通过我所谓的“负主权”的镜头，它描述了一种等于或少于零的代理形式，并且位于官方历史记录的正面，我认为这部小说将战争造成的破坏描述为主题。国家想象力核心的霸权男性气质危机。因此，本文将这部小说的主人公威利·邓恩读为体现这种主权的一种“奇怪的”主观性，