Trauma In Colum Mccann's Let The Great World Spin

It is easy for individuals to feel alone in the world after they go through a traumatic event. For many, however, a life changing experience can bring them closer to others. In Colum McCann’s novel Let the Great World Spin, characters find their place in the huge city of New York only after suffering. Trauma is a watershed experience marked by severe pain, the negative effects of which can stay with a person for a lifetime if they do not find a healthy way to move on. Stressful events can, however, be beneficial because they bring unlikely people together and widen individuals’ world views, creating a closer knit society through a shared experience. A person who normally feels as if he has no place can share the experience of trauma, especially death, with others and then be better able to survive his agony. Pain can change a personality, dictate how someone picks friends, and even keep New York

When two people recognize that they have both experienced a similar struggle, they are brought together. This is what happens with Ciaran and his priest brother’s prostitute friends in Let the Great World Spin. When he first arrives in Brooklyn, Ciaran feels out of place and cannot understand why his brother Corrigan lives there. There is no starker contrast then that between the old beach village they are from in Ireland and the needle ridden streets of New York. Ciaran struggles as an adult to find his place in the city, even though it seems like everybody else knows where they belong. When Ciaran finds that his brother’s closest friends are the prostitutes that work on the streets outside his apartment, he is shocked. Ciaran thinks they are taking advantage of his brother’s kindness, saying “there you go on your knees to all the tramps and the lepers and the cripples and dopeheads”(McCann 40). This all changes, however, when Corrigan is the victim in a