earticle

영어

This study examines Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These as a contemporary reinterpretation of Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. Set in 1985 Ireland, the novel investigates the institutional violence of the Magdalene Laundries through protagonist Bill Furlong’s moral struggles with recognizing and responding to systematic injustice. The paper demonstrates that Keegan moves beyond Arendt’s focus on the absence of critical self-awareness by revealing how ordinary people can fully recognize institutional evil yet choose inaction due to complex socioeconomic pressures. Through Furlong’s sophisticated moral reasoning and eventual courageous action, Keegan suggests that the banality of evil paradoxically requires active moral imagination rather than simple ethical blindness. The temporal distance between the novel’s 1980s setting and its 2020s perspective enables a critical examination of how institutional evil persists even when individuals maintain their capacity for ethical judgment. This analysis argues that Keegan’s work compels a fundamental reconsideration of the banality of evil as arising from the tension between moral consciousness and structural constraints, offering crucial insights into contemporary manifestations of institutional violence and ethical challenges in modern society.