Small Things Like These and the Novella as Intervention

Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These transforms the novella form into a moral and formal intervention that exposes Ireland’s enduring complicity in the Magdalene Laundries. Through the ethical awakening of Bill Furlong, a working-class man in 1980s Ireland, Keegan stages a confrontation between individual conscience and collective denial. This article argues that the novella operates metaleptically, collapsing the boundary between fiction and reader, to compel ethical recognition through both structure and story. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theories of intervention and gendered power, alongside trauma and narrative theory, the analysis situates Keegan’s novella as a site where literature performs historical work. Keegan’s novella’s compression, moral clarity and refusal of catharsis embody a sustained interrogation of silence, complicity and institutional violence. In this way, Small Things Like These not only reanimates collective memory but demonstrates how the novella form itself can enact ethical and political agency, bridging private conscience and public reckoning. By reconfiguring the boundaries between history and imagination, Keegan reclaims the novella as a mode of resistance, insisting that moral responsibility persists beyond historical closure.