Bedsit, Ranelagh, suburban Dublin, 2013-215

The bedsit, short for bedroom-sitting room, the one room studio apartment that the narrator rents, symbolizes her inclination to isolation, her embrace of loneliness as a given condition. The bedsit is street level, and the narrator keeps the window open all the time, whatever the weather, which symbolizes how the narrator is both close to but apart from the world around her. When she first moves in, she is initially inclined to unpack all the accumulated “ephemera” (9) from her life, framed photos, porcelain figurines, antique ashtrays, and set them around the room. But over time the objects only make her feel “foolish,” more like a visitor than a resident, as if she is living on a stage set with obvious props in some “bad theatre production” (9). She does not feel as if this bedsit is home. The apartment then becomes the appropriate setting for...