Morality and Bravery

In Small Things Like These, Keegan details Furlong’s interior life in order to position questions of morality and virtue as the novella’s central thematic concerns. In the final pages of the novella, as Furlong saves Sarah Redmond from the convent, he asks himself, “was there any point in being alive without helping one another?... Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been—which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life” (113-114). Here, Keegan details Furlong’s thoughts in order to emphasize the knotty moral questions with which Furlong toils. The locus of conflict is not, mainly, between Furlong and the external world, but within Furlong himself. He grapples with...