48 pages • 1 hour read
Claire KeeganSmall Things Like These
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
Eileen is grateful when Furlong returns with the money gift from the nuns, but she comments that he looks out of sorts. She insists that he hurry and change for second Mass, which he attends, reluctantly, with his wife and his daughters. Furlong “didn’t join in so much as listen” (49), as the Mass strikes him as especially performative today. Later, he is restless at home while his family engages in Christmas preparations, so he says that he is going to take some mince pies to his friend Ned, the farmhand who worked at Mrs. Wilson’s with his mother. Eileen says that Ned is welcome to come to dinner on Christmas.
Furlong remembers an occasion just after Kathleen was born when he went to see Ned and asked him who his father was. Ned replied that lots of visitors came over from England to visit the Wilsons, and one of them might have slept with his mother. However, on this occasion, when he tries to visit Ned, a woman with an Enniscorthy accent tells him that Ned was previously in the hospital with pneumonia but is now convalescing in a home. The woman then remarks that Ned and Furlong are clearly related, as the likeness between them is obvious. He sees that Mrs. Wilson’s house is exactly as it used to be and retreats to his lorry feeling empty. He sits there thinking about what the woman said. Then, he thinks about the girl in the coal shed and realizes he is a hypocrite because he pocketed the money the nuns gave him without helping the girl or following up on her plea that he find out about her baby.
Chapter 7 Summary
On Christmas Eve, Furlong makes his rounds, delivering coal. He considers the poverty of everyone around him, including his own family, as he estimates that he will have to change his lorry’s engine and that Eileen’s desire for new windows in the house will have to wait another two years.
Furlong and his men eat at Kehoe’s at the coal yard’s expense. As he is paying, Mrs. Kehoe says that she knows that Furlong had “a run-in” (58) with the Mother Superior at the convent. She warns him to be vigilant about what he reports on the convent’s activities. While she implies that the nuns run everything, Furlong contests that they have only as much power as people give them. Mrs. Kehoe, however, warns him not to throw everything he worked for away and reminds him that there is only a wall between the convent and his daughters’ school. She maintains that he cannot oppose the nuns who run the convent without creating problems with those who run the school.
When he leaves Mrs. Kehoe’s, it is snowing. He walks around town, thinking about what she said and taking in all the festive details. He goes to the barber’s and looks in the mirror, “searching for a resemblance to Ned, which he both could and could not see” (61). He begins thinking how downhearted Ned seemed after Furlong’s mother passed away. He realizes Ned fulfilled some fatherly duties, such as polishing Furlong’s shoes and teaching him how to shave. He picks up Eileen’s Christmas gift, a pair of patent shoes, and is conscious that he is delaying his return home, where he will join his family for Midnight Mass.
He crosses the River Barrow and remembers the story of the monks’ order that punished the people who rebelled against its levying of disproportionate taxes by cursing the river and insisting that it would take three lives every year. He recalls that his mother believed in the superstition and remembers the Dublin girl at the convent who asked him to free her so she could drown herself in the river. He continues walking down the river until he reaches the convent, where he walks around to the main entrance. He opens the coal shed and asks the captive, Sarah, to come home with him. At first, he considers taking Sarah to the priest’s house, but then he realizes that the priests are complicit with the nuns. As Furlong walks through town with the girl, the villagers immediately realize where she came from and give him a wide berth. No one asks about Sarah or where he is taking her. They go through the town square, where the girl admires the illuminated manger. As they walk home, Furlong wonders whether there is any point in being alive if people are not going to help one another. He even feels euphoric walking alongside the girl, even though he knows he will pay for his actions. He is grateful for Mrs. Wilson, who ensured his own mother did not end up in a home similar to the one he rescued Sarah from.
Furlong feels that the consequences of his actions will cost him; however, leaving Sarah in the coal shed was the worst thing he could do, and he knows he would have regretted that for the rest of his life. While fear outweighs every other feeling as he and Sarah walk toward his front door, “in his foolish heart he not only hoped but legitimately believed that they would manage” (67).
Chapters 6-7 Analysis
The last two chapters resolve the questions raised in the previous ones, even as Keegan opts for an open ending, leaving the full consequences of Furlong’s rescue unspecified.
First, the issue of Furlong’s paternity, which he attempted to resolve throughout his adult life by checking at the registry office and asking Mrs. Wilson and Ned, is resolved by a random woman’s comment that he and Ned are clearly related to one another. Although after much reflection Furlong admits the answer is obvious, and he even sees the resemblance himself in the barber’s glass, he thinks that “the things that were closest” were “so often the hardest to see” (62). Furlong’s experience represents the complexity of Otherness and Belonging in a Closed Community. While the adults around him were spinning notions of Furlong as an outsider, and even Ned entertained the theory that his mother’s seducer was one of the Protestant visitors to the Wilson household, Furlong’s origins are, in fact, deeply rooted in New Ross with his domestic mother and farmhand father. Furlong, who no longer needs to believe in an exotic, high-status father, feels aligned with the truth that his real father was the one who tied his shoelaces and taught him how to shave.
Furlong attempts to follow Mrs. Wilson’s example and liberate a young mother from a life of penitence and abuse in the Magdalen laundry, highlighting Society’s Conflation of Gender and Morality. However, leading up to this event, other women remind him that there will be consequences if he does not stay on the right side of the nuns. Eileen is anxious to make certain that he thanked the nuns vigorously enough for the Christmas bonus they gave him, and Mrs. Kehoe warns him that the nuns “have a finger in every pie” (59), using idiomatic language to illustrate the nuns’ role in all of New Ross’s dealings, especially in his daughters’ school. Eileen’s and Mrs. Kehoe’s warnings are evidence that the nuns’ behavior at the convent is an open secret, as is the reaction of the townspeople when Furlong leads Sarah through the streets, and everyone immediately recognizes her as coming from the Magdalen laundry.
The novel ends with Furlong leading Sarah to the front door of his home; his family’s reaction is not revealed. Omitting his family’s reaction focuses the narration on the juxtaposition of Furlong’s dread of the consequences of his actions with the optimistic feeling in his “foolish heart” that he “not only hoped but legitimately believed that they would manage” (68). Exposing the abuse perpetrated at the Magdalen laundries and creating space in society for unmarried girls who are pregnant or have given birth foreshadow Ireland’s reckoning with these issues, a process that continues to the present day. Thus, while Furlong’s actions may have dire consequences for his family within the novel’s context, his choices anticipate imminent societal reforms.
