'Small Things Like These': comparative modes

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A summary of notes on the 4 comparative modes and how they might apply to Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. Lots of course overlap.

Also in this series:

THEMES

  • Responsibility and provision; duty.

  • Personal blindness, self-realisation and personal development. And the parallel blindness of Irish society.

  • Conscience, integrity, individual self. Moral dilemmas, ethics.

  • The fragility of life.

  • The influences of and shaping by childhood.

  • The power of economics in shaping individual lives.

  • Time.

  • The influence of the past.

  • Religion (morality, marriage): see Cultural Context.

  • Furlong’s journey (‘wherever you want to go, son’). Doorways. Think of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’.

  • Yearning, escape (both Furlong and the girls).

  • Beliefs, faith; where personal values clash with religious doctrine.

  • Complicity.

  • Family; parenting.

  • The search for Identity (reflections) - alternative versions of life. The shaping of character. Furlong’s mother could have been in the convent.

  • [All elements of Cultural Context can open up theme too].

CULTURAL CONTEXT

  • Gender - treatment of women (see Mrs Kehoe’s remark). The Virgin Mary (p.15) ‘kneeling passively’.

  • Class attitudes.

  • An obsession with transgressive sexuality. The ‘fallen’ women, the ‘shame’ of illegitimate birth.

  • Treatment of children. Illegitimate children do not ‘matter’ as much as ones born from a marriage - ‘common’.

  • The family, and those excluded from that norm.

  • And do some women internalise/enable this treatment?

  • Roman Catholic Church: a power-structure, hierarchy (‘all the one’ - Mrs Kehoe). The convent, the priests, the schools (Furlong was spat on and called ‘a name’; his daughters have only the one ‘good’ school to go to). The power-struggle of the (superficially civil) encounter with the Mother Superior. Pre-divorce, contraception, abortion.

  • Class attitudes (the Protestant Mrs Wilson).

  • 1985: economic problems, closing businesses (Albatros, Graves & Co etc). Even the supposedly secure Furlongs need to be careful. A constrained world. Mick Synnott’s foraging son.

  • A close-knit community, at times oppressively so (can be censorious). And this can make a family like the Furlongs all the more vulnerable.

  • Monoculture in terms of religion, race, language (the rare Polish and Russian foreign visitors). Very insular.

  • Conformity.

  • The impact of this culture on individual lives. How would lives be different now?

  • The moving statues 1985: see the first 5 minutes of the relevant episode of Reeling in the Years.

GENERAL VISION AND VIEWPOINT

  • The overal context: recession, emigration, people everywhere struggling.

  • The grim oppressive power-structure of the Roman Catholic Church.

  • Treatment of children.

  • Furlong’s decency (like Kinsella in Foster).

  • But also, the joy of family life (is this threatened for Furlong at the end?).

  • The end: is trouble ahead? Do we admire him? Is he ‘foolish’?

  • The River: the dark undertow, Furlong’s journey.

  • Reflections (windows, mirrors).

  • Fracturing: ‘a part of him’, the jigsaw. Is he made whole by the end?

  • Doors, windows, locks.

LITERARY GENRE (not examined in 2025).

  • Understated style; a spare style with moments of greater elaboration.

  • Opening up big issues in the particular.

  • The subtlety of many details (the ‘hurried-looking hand’ from the Mother Superior on the card containing money, revealing how cynical the ‘gift’ was - a bribe)

  • The withholding of information, particularly Furlong’s father. The scarcely-noticeable seeds Keegan drops every now and then about Ned.

  • Primarily a linear structure, but Furlong’s past story is gradually revealed, woven into the present.

  • Use of motifs (doors, windows, mirrors, particular grammatical constructions).

  • Use of imagery, particular symbolism (overlaps with motifs).

  • ‘Escalations’: key moments which push on the story - see the post on George Saunders.

  • 3rd person narrative which comes out of Furlong’s consciousness.

  • Rich use of local detail and atmosphere to evoke New Ross in 1980s.

  • The end: as with Foster, there is an after-story for us to imagine.