Colm Tóibín’s “Brooklyn”: Caught Between Home and Exile
Colm Tóibín’s “Brooklyn”: Caught Between Home and Exile

Summary/Abstract: This paper is an analysis of the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín’s recent novel Brooklyn (2009) in which the author explores a string of intricate relationships between people and place while depicting the story of Irish emigration in 1950s. Tóibín employs simple expressive sentences in order to mirror his characters’ struggles in understanding the distance between the inner and the outer selves. As he grippingly portrays the strangeness of a new place, the central character in Brooklyn is dislocated in time and space creating a sense of melancholy and depression. The heroine’s loneliness in an unfamiliar city is pictured so vividly that she represents the immigrant experience caught between two worlds.

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