Small Things Like These: 12 Essay Prompts for Close Analysis

These twelve prompts are designed to help you write focused, text-driven essays on Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. Each prompt includes a rationale, a defendable thesis direction, and specific evidence leads drawn from the novel. Use the linked character guides and theme pages to deepen your research.

1. Bill Furlong’s Moral Awakening: From Passive Provider to Active Rescuer

Why it matters – The novel traces how an ordinary, hardworking man crosses the line from quiet complicity to risky action. Understanding his change reveals Keegan’s argument about what generates moral courage.

Sample thesis direction – Furlong’s transformation is not a sudden epiphany but a gradual accumulation of small memories (Mrs Wilson’s care, his mother’s fate, the Sinnott boy’s hunger) that eventually make inaction intolerable.

Evidence leads

Chapter 3: Furlong gives money to Mick Sinnott’s boy and lies awake worrying about his children and the hard times around him.
Chapter 4: He witnesses the girl polishing the chapel floor and her plea to be taken to the river; he tells Eileen but initially accepts her silence.
Chapter 7: He refuses Communion, calling himself a hypocrite, and later berates himself for taking the convent money and not asking about Sarah’s baby.
Chapter 8: He retrieves Sarah from the coal shed and leads her through town, feeling “a happiness akin to this” for the first time.

2. The Role of Furlong’s Illegitimate Past in His Decision to Help Sarah

Why it matters – The novel directly connects personal history to moral choice. Exploring this causality shows how empathy is forged through lived experience.

Sample thesis direction – Furlong’s own birth as an illegitimate child, saved only because Mrs Wilson refused to conform, makes him recognise that Sarah could have been his mother – or himself – and that his survival depends on repaying that rescue.

Evidence leads

Chapter 3: Details of his mother’s pregnancy, Mrs Wilson’s support, and the “Unknown” father on his birth certificate.
Chapter 4: The argument with Eileen: “Where would I be now?” after she dismisses the convent girls.
Chapter 6: He learns Sarah’s real name (Sarah, his mother’s name) and sees her leaking breast milk.
Chapter 8: Furlong thinks of Mrs Wilson’s “daily kindnesses” and realizes his mother “might very well have wound up in that place.”

3. The Marriage of Bill and Eileen: Complicity Versus Conscience

Why it matters – Their conflict dramatizes the central ethical tension of the novel: how a family survives in a community that demands silence.

Sample thesis direction – Eileen’s pragmatism reflects the community’s survival code, but her repeated discouragement of Bill’s compassion forces him to choose between marital loyalty and moral integrity.

Evidence leads

Chapter 3: Eileen dismisses Bill’s help for the Sinnott boy: “Some of these bring the hardship on themselves.”
Chapter 4: Her long speech: “There’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.”
Chapter 4: She cheaply reminds Bill he was “far from hardship” because of Mrs Wilson.
Chapter 7: Bill feels trapped at home, escapes to visit Ned, and sleeps alone after refusing Communion.
Chapter 8: He acts entirely without her knowledge or support, climbing the hill toward home with Sarah.

4. Contrasting Domestic Warmth and Institutional Cold

Why it matters – Keegan’s juxtaposition of the loving Furlong household with the abusive convent underlines the hypocrisy of a society that cherishes children only within certain families.

Sample thesis direction – The novel repeatedly sets scenes of family intimacy against the convent’s locked doors and bare feet to argue that care is not a given but a choice, and that institutions can be colder than any winter.

Evidence leads

Chapter 4: Tree-lighting, Christmas cake baking, girls’ letters to Santa, sherry by the fire.
Chapter 4: Eileen’s cool dismissal of the convent problem while icing the cake.
Chapter 5: The girl on her knees polishing the chapel floor, begging to drown; the nun locks the door.
Chapter 8: Sarah vomits in the street, then pauses at the lighted manger and strokes the donkey’s ear.

5. Silence and Complicity as Collective Sin

Why it matters – This is the novel’s central theme: how ordinary people allow cruelty by looking away.

Sample thesis direction – Keegan presents silence not as passive but as an active, corrosive force; every character who refuses to speak or act (Eileen, the new housekeeper, the townspeople on Christmas Eve) becomes an accessory.

Evidence leads

Chapter 4: Eileen’s directive: “Things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.”
Chapter 5: Furlong sees the padlock on the chapel door, the broken glass on the wall, but says nothing to the nun.
Chapter 7: Furlong condemns himself for taking the fifty-pound note and leaving Sarah at the table.
Chapter 8: Mrs Kehoe warns, “They’re all the one” – implying the entire town knows.
Chapter 9 (Author’s Note): The historical record confirms that Church and State jointly ran Magdalen laundries.

6. The Coal Shed as Symbol of Hidden Cruelty

Why it matters – The coal shed recurs as the novel’s most charged space; tracing its use clarifies how Keegan materialises institutional abuse.

Sample thesis direction – The coal shed functions as the literal and metaphorical hidden space where society disposes of its “problems”; Furlong’s progression from witnessing it to entering it to retrieving Sarah from it maps his moral journey.

Evidence leads

Chapter 5: The girl inside the chapel (not yet the shed) begs for death; the nun locks the chapel door.
Chapter 6: Furlong finds Sarah locked in the coal shed all night; he helps her out.
Chapter 6: The Mother Superior pretends Sarah “wandered off” and calls it “hide and seek.”
Chapter 8: Furlong chooses to go back for her, opening the shed door himself.

7. The 1916 Proclamation Epigraph as Moral Benchmark

Why it matters – The novel opens with a promise to “cherish all the children of the nation equally.” This sets an ideal that the story’s events relentlessly violate.

Sample thesis direction – The epigraph is not window-dressing; it creates an ironic framework that turns Furlong’s small act of rescue into a test of whether the nation’s founding ideals can survive the reality of Church power.

Evidence leads

Chapter 1: The full epigraph, promising equality and liberty.
Chapter 4: The convent girls are poorly dressed, locked in, and treated as less than human.
Chapter 8: Furlong asks himself, “Was there any point in being alive without helping one another?” and recalls the Christmas message.
Chapter 9: Keegan’s note records that no apology came until 2013, and thousands of babies died.

8. The Crows as Omen of the Convent’s Evil

Why it matters – The novel uses natural imagery to signal moral disorder. The crows are the most pointed example.

Sample thesis direction – The “unsettling” gathering of crows around the convent in December foreshadows the hidden suffering inside and the moral storm about to break over Furlong.

Evidence leads

Chapter 4: “Crows were gathering on and around the convent… unsettling the town.”
Chapter 5: Furlong finds the desperate girl polishing the floor; the nun is cold and controlling.
Chapter 6: The discovery of Sarah locked in the coal shed.
Chapter 8: Furlong walks Sarah through town amid stares and confrontations; the atmosphere is tense and wintry.

9. The Ambiguous Ending: Joy, Fear, and Unresolved Consequence

Why it matters – The final paragraphs refuse a neat resolution. Interpreting their ambiguity reveals what kind of hope (if any) the novel endorses.

Sample thesis direction – Furlong’s unprecedented joy is real, but it coexists with the certain knowledge that he will “pay for it”; the ending argues that moral action must be taken without guarantee of a happy outcome.

Evidence leads

Chapter 8: Furlong feels “a happiness akin to this” for the first time, even as fear outweighs every other feeling.
Chapter 8: People react with avoidance, confrontation, and pity; no one helps.
Chapter 8: The final sentence: “he not only hoped but legitimately believed that they would manage.”
Chapter 7: Bill earlier sat in his lorry for half an hour, remembering he took the money and left Sarah.

10. Mrs Wilson as a Model of Quiet Moral Action

Why it matters – Mrs Wilson never appears in the present of the story, yet her actions decades earlier shape Furlong’s ability to act.

Sample thesis direction – Mrs Wilson’s decision to keep Bill’s mother on, her daily kindnesses, and her refusal to care about gossip provide the ethical template that Furlong finally – almost unconsciously – follows.

Evidence leads

Chapter 3: She kept the pregnant domestic employed, brought mother and child home from hospital, raised Bill through childhood.
Chapter 3: She gave him money to start the coal business; “some said … one of her own had fathered him.”
Chapter 7: Bill visits the Wilson house; the new housekeeper notes his likeness to the family.
Chapter 8: Furlong credits her: “Had it not been for her, his mother might very well have wound up in that place.”

11. Mother Superior and Mrs Kehoe: Institutional Power vs. Grassroots Wisdom

Why it matters – The novel pits two kinds of female authority against each other: the repressive power of the Church and the clear-eyed, protective knowledge of the townswoman.

Sample thesis direction – Mrs Kehoe’s warning that the nuns “have all kinds of powers” and are “all the one” with the priests reveals that ordinary people know the truth; courage lies not in discovering the secret but in acting despite knowing the cost.

Evidence leads

Chapter 5: The Mother Superior’s calm lies, her “strong, spoiled pony” demeanor, her control of the convent.
Chapter 6: The young nun is frightened; Sarah is renamed “Enda” and kept silent.
Chapter 8: Mrs Kehoe tells Furlong, “They’re all the one” and warns that the nuns will make him pay.
Chapter 8: Furlong decides to act, remembering Mrs Kehoe’s words.

12. The Mushroom-Factory Memory: Breaking the Cycle of Meaningless Labour

Why it matters – The mushroom-factory memory is the novel’s most explicit reflection on existential dread; it directly links to Furlong’s need to find purpose.

Sample thesis direction – The image of mushrooms “pushing through the compost again” haunts Furlong because it suggests life is endless, pointless repetition; rescuing Sarah is his attempt to invest his days with genuine meaning – to break the cycle.

Evidence leads

Chapter 4: Furlong recalls the mushroom factory: “his heart had fallen, knowing the same would happen over again.”
Chapter 4: Later that night he wonders, “What was it all for?” and feels trapped by routine.
Chapter 7: At home he feels the room closing in, longs to be out walking a dark field.
Chapter 8: The walk with Sarah brings “a fresh, new, unrecognisable joy” – a distinct break from the dailiness of coal delivery.

Use these prompts as starting points for your own argument. For further help, see the questions and answers page or the in-depth theme analyses.