Maeve has a multi-layered narrative structure because it moves through a series of flashbacks of Maeve, the heroine, as a young girl, a teenage schoolgirl and a young woman. This use of flashback is central to the film's examination of memory. Maeve returns to her native Belfast and remembers certain personal and apparently-unrelated incidents which gradually build up a picture of her personal dilemma and a more general view of a Catholic woman's experience of the Troubles'. However, although the narrative is largely identified with Maeve's point of view through this device, the film does not present her as the ideal Heroine, the source of truth. She is, rather, one troubled individual among others. The film deals with a spectrum of attitudes and refuses to take one position in relation to its subject. The question that Maeve