Brooklyn By Colm Toibin Analysis

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“Home,” as a theme stresses the division of finding peace in new opportunities provided to Eilis in Brooklyn. However, these new opportunities become hard to settle on when Eilis’s recollections of Ireland associated with her old home flooded her. With this, “home” becomes a place with torn meaning, proving to be captive of joy as well as depression. As Eilis travels to Americas, her new home is infested with overwhelming nodes of homesickness and nostalgia. Still, it pushes Eilis to become independent and carve a promising life for herself. In Brooklyn, Colm Toibin’s Eilis Lacey deals with homesickness, a typical experience of immigration. She struggles to come to terms with the physical and emotional consequences that come about from living …show more content…

Eilis exhumes the struggle of being home in “more than one place,” America and Ireland. Eilis got along with the Irish of her kind in Enniscorthy, and while in America she stood up to her housemates by defending woman and colour and other races and deciding to marry an Italian boy, Tony. “Cosmopolitanism” also relates to the distance, physically and mentally, from family evident through the novel where she tries to keep her dual realities from Ireland and America at bay by leaving out information to send home to Enniscorthy and by leaving letters from Brooklyn untouched when in Ireland. The tension between what is means to be “home” leaves Eilis with the feeling of the “uncanny” meaning what is familiar but feels strange. This is evident in Brooklyn when Eilis comes home to Ireland “for the familiarity of these rooms that she presumed she would be happy to step back into them” however, being in them now, all she could do “was count the days before she went back” (Toibin 213). Stoddard says that many Irish leave their homeland, making it a “haunted house” (Stoddard 150). Eilis’s empty house with her mother alone for the first time that mourns the loss of her daughter as well as all of the brothers who have hence moved away as if they are gone. The feeling of the “uncanny” upon entering her homeland’s place after all of these changes solidifies the Irish immigrants experience when returning back home to a feeling of familiarity however there are changes that obliterate the sense of security such as the death of her sister and her and her mother experiencing interaction alone in the

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