Question: Name one text on your comparative course and identify a hero, heroine or villain you studied. Use one or more key moments to explain whether in your opinion, this character reacted positively or negatively when faced with a difficult situation. Support your answer with reference to the text.
Small Things Like These Hero
A hero in Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is Bill Furlong. Bill reacts positively to a difficult situation when he finds out about the mistreatment of the girls at the convent.
On his first visit to the convent, he sees that the girls are on the floor polishing with no shoes on and that their hair has been shaved off roughly with shears. One of the girls asks Bill to take her to the river so that she can drown herself. He is shocked at how the girls are treated and when he sees that there is broken glass on top of the walls, he realises that the convent is basically a prison.
When he gets home, his wife Eileen is angry with him for bringing up the convent and tells him that it is none of his business. She tells him that they need to ignore what is happening if they want to keep making money.
Bill doesn’t ignore it and goes to the convent a second time and finds a young girl locked in the shed surrounded by her own excrement. He brings the young girl into the convent and he is asked to sit with Mother Superior. Mother Superior subtly threatens him by mentioning how hard it is to get into St Margaret’s secondary school and that his daughters might not get a place. She also gives him an envelope with £50 in it, which is a bribe to keep quiet about the young girl. Then he finds out that her name is Sarah, the same name as his mother who was also an unmarried mother, who was saved from the convent by Mrs Wilson.
Bill is faced with a difficult decision and is warned by Mrs Kehoe and Eileen not to mess with the nuns as there will be consequences. Despite this, he goes back a third time on Christmas Eve and finds Sarah in the shed once more and he takes the young girl and carries her home, through the town as people look on. He defies the nuns and all the consequences to do the right thing and this makes him a hero.