Global Travel and In/voluntary Border Crossings: Anne Enright’s “The Hotel” (2017)

This chapter reads Anne Enright’s short story “The Hotel” (2017) as a sophisticated response to a range of contemporary concerns around migration and refugees. The story approaches refugees’ experience of involuntary border crossing via the voluntary experience of international travel: Enright’s protagonist finds herself in a different country late at night after her flight is rerouted, and her search for the airport hotel seemingly leads her into a queue of people seeking asylum. Utilising core strengths of the modern short form, Enright’s story employs a fragmentary, open-ended and ambiguous approach in which the line between reality and sleep-deprived imagination becomes increasingly blurred.