A Week in Winter

“People come to this wild place and they need an Aran sweater, and they need it now, not in a few weeks’ time.”

This moment references one of the most famous Irish handcrafts that is highly coveted by American tourists searching for a symbol of warmth and authenticity. The line highlights Walter’s distinctive Americanness, as well as his personal approach to satisfaction: hedonic and absolute. This personal nature foreshadows the way he later takes the same approach to love and romance, living in the moment without thinking about the stability of the future.

“The shock had long gone now, and the real memory of her life with him was becoming vague. She very rarely went back there in her mind anyway. Yet the false life, the fantasy existence was crystal sharp and clear.”

Many of the characters in the novel deal with an imbalance of the Internal Versus External Self. Here, Chicky has constructed a false external self for the purposes of preserving her dignity and self-worth in the eyes of her family. Eventually, this false front overtakes her more authentic self, and her journey becomes a process of gaining back that authentic self.

“As happens in many big families, the children who left became dissociated with their old home.”

This moment suggests the beginning of a Personal Transformation, in which characters leave behind the expectations of their familial framework and build themselves anew. Large families are stereotypically associated with Irish households, and this growing a large family represents a typical life path that many people across the country would have taken at this time. The concept of dissatisfaction is one that several characters face on their journeys of reinvention and redemption.