What do "doorways" represent in the novel, Small Things Like These?

In Small Things Like These, doorways represent Furlong’s burgeoning dissatisfaction with his own life. Midway through the novella, as he enters the convent coal shed to find an abused young woman, Furlong asks himself “if he had not turned into a man consigned to doorways, for did he not spend the best part of his life standing outside of one or another, waiting for them to be opened” (61). Furlong spends much of the novella contemplating a certain insufficiency in his life. He feels a sense of general dissatisfaction, as if his life as a businessman, father, and husband lacks a profound, deeper meaning. In this way, he often lingers in a metaphorical doorway, waiting for some ineffable change to happen to him. His decision to help Sarah Redmond, then, represents the moment in which Furlong finally steps through a door and engenders a change in his life.