Brooklyn Themes

In Brooklyn, a novel that charts a young woman’s journey from Ireland to Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín illustrates the human capacity to gradually embrace new circumstances. Eilis Lacey reluctantly leaves her small hometown of Enniscorthy to live and work in Brooklyn, and though she’s overwhelmingly homesick at first and struggles to fit in amongst her new surroundings, she eventually comes to love her life in the United States. This, as her pastor Father Flood suggests…

Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn is a novel that examines the effects of immigration on a person’s life. A lower-middleclass woman, Eilis uproots her life in Ireland to travel to the United States in the hopes of gaining economic opportunity. In her small hometown of Enniscorthy, she has been trying to work as a bookkeeper for quite some time, but even her sister’s employer won’t hire her. As a result, she takes a job in a grocery…

In the broadest sense, Brooklyn is a simple coming-of-age tale. Charting the end of Eilis’s adolescence and the beginning of her adulthood, Tóibín creates a portrait of a young woman as she enters the adult world while navigating a life abroad. Interestingly enough, though, Eilis remains passive throughout the novel, despite her many advancements. Although she gains various forms of success and ultimately begins to actively work toward new opportunities, the major decisions she…