This book, in 70 small pages, was able to take me on an emotional rollercoaster and a deeper understanding of one’s purpose for living. For one, their purpose can be to find beauty (whatever that means) within the humdrum of our dark, yet boring reality, like Corrigan, while others refuse to accept beauty as a part of life, like the boys’ mother, who even in her las moments on Earth, refused to let any light into her home simply because she believed it would damage her carpet, as if light is a deteriorating factor rather than a rejuvenating one.
This book and its meanings can be broken into two separate parts. The first is its geography and it how it affects the characters who inhabit it. When put very simply, the prologue and the end of chapter one, filled with the evils that are brought upon by the extreme pressures and influences of city life are bridged together by a more simplistic lifestyle that is created by the more relaxed environment of Dublin, Ireland. However, there is more meaning of this placement that simply placing a more relaxed environment (Dublin) in between two city-life environments. In fact, what it really shows is how two environments that appear to be the antithesis of each other at first glance can actually create similar emotions and actions of the people that inhabit these places.
Though New York City seems to be full of chaos, where days aren’t made official until the daily noise of sirens, as mentioned in the prologue, Dublin possesses evils of its own, where its relaxed mood isn’t always a good thing, as it seems as if the environment itself doesn’t even care about itself enough to even try to get out of its own grayness (Chapter 1). Here, McCann is trying to suggest that two completely opposite environments can cause similar experiences and all lead back to the same road filled with impiety and depressive stages. Nonetheless, each environment gives people the chance at their own escape from reality, from the heroin users and prostitutes of New York City to the drunks of Dublin along the shore line, as if their only hopes are for that very shore line to sweep them away to a new and better life, one they know will never come. Hey, I never said these escapes were great either. In essence, McCann suggests that no matter the society we live in, even the escapes that are given to us only create a new environment filled with as much evil and hopelessness as the last. We just don’t know it yet.
The next part of the book I want to get into is my feelings towards the characters of this book. First off, let me say I felt a deep connection to most of these characters, as I see myself or many of my close friends and family in almost all of these characters. The boys’ mother reminds me so much of my own mother, who is also very sweet and kind in her own right. Yet, what baffles me about the mother is why she seems to be so disconnected to life, from hiding her feelings when the boys decided to put on their father’s clothes, to not allowing light into her own home to prevent the carpet from getting ruined. The narrator is the one who feels most alien to me as he seems to look more at other people’s lives rather than focus on his own. It’s almost as if he lives his life through others.
Finally there is Corrigan. At first, I wasn’t really sure how to feel about him. t first, I thought of him as that annoying little brother who always gets all the attention from strangers because he is simply “too cute.” Then, I realized there was something much more philosophical to Corrigan’s lifestyle, from trying to find beauties within all the war and poverty in the world, to the charity he did all on his own without ever “sponsoring” a religion with a Bible, a collar, or any other religious symbol. This really proved to me that Corrigan was truly trying to create a beautiful world, something that can never truly be achieved, because what is beautiful to one, like what Corrigan saw in his last moments, can be total nonsense to another, like with what Adelita thought Corrigan was describing. From this, we must ask ourselves: how beautiful is beauty?
