Narrating Irish Identity and Intimacy: Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (2021) and Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018)

Abstract

This thesis explores how Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (2021) and Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018) represent Irish identity and emotional intimacy. Although Keegan and Rooney differ in style, setting, and tone, both authors investigate how private emotional life is shaped by collective histories and cultural transformation. Keegan’s fiction revisits the moral silences of 1980s Ireland, particularly around the Magdalene Laundries, while Rooney’s narrative unfolds in the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger crash, portraying the disorientation of a generation shaped by economic instability and emotional disconnection. The thesis argues that through contrasting but complementary narrative strategies, Keegan and Rooney examine intimacy as an ethical practice and Irishness as a lived, affective experience. Rather than relying on explicit historical exposition or national symbolism, both authors embed questions of morality and identity into atmosphere, dialogue, and the subtleties of everyday relationships. By reading their work through the frameworks of cultural memory and ethics of care, this study demonstrates how contemporary Irish literature registers national legacies not only in memory, but in feeling. Ultimately, this comparative approach shows that Keegan and Rooney present fiction as a space for ethical reflection and emotional depth, redefining its role in contemporary Irish culture beyond traditional frameworks of national identity. Their work highlights how moral action and cultural belonging emerge not through resolution, but through sustained attention to the complexities of intimacy, complicity, and care. In doing so, they offer insight into how Irish literature speaks to both its national past and a broader, shared condition of uncertainty.