Joyce, James - Commenti ai racconti

Dubliners

Dubliners consists of fifteen short stories, all set in Dublin. His effort was to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people doing ordinary things and living an ordinary life. The stories are arranged in four groups: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life.
He represents Dublin as a cruel city as he was hostile to the city life. The compassion for others doesn’t exist. All the characters are afflicted people, paralyzed as they are unable to change, to change themselves and their life, unable to make decisions etc. They get the opportunity to change but they can’t.
He describes a time of crisis and uncertainty. In the first three short stories he employs the first person narrator, while for the other twelve stories he uses the third person narrator.
The moral of ‘Dubliners’ is not the paralysis itself, but its revelation to the victims. The main theme is the impossibility to find a way out of paralysis. Nobody succeeds in finding an escape.

Style

To gain realism he resorts to the frequent use of symbols and impersonal narrator, to let the characters describe themselves only through their actions. Through the use of symbols he points out facts and analyzes the particular. He also resorts to the use of epiphany: a sudden realization caused by an external object.

Evelyne

Evelyn is a short story that appears in the ‘adolescence’ collection. The story starts in medias res with a free indirect speech. She is sitting by the window looking at the street outside and all the wanders. Joyce describes the room giving us the idea of a dusty place. Dust is indeed the symbol of repetition, something that stays, like the paralysis. He indirectly describes Evelyn as a paralyzed person, immobile. Her mother died and she took her place, substituting her and being treated as a servant and feeling scared and in danger for her father’s violence. By the window she hears the music of an organ. This triggers her mind and provokes a sensation of a sudden realization of her conditions. She thinks about her childhood and what she had done to Frank. Frank was her fiancée and had proposed her to go away with him to Buenos Aires. She recalls to the memory the moment where she was at the harbour but suddenly she didn’t have to courage to leave even though it was her biggest desire. She got paralyzed, stuck.

The Dead

The Dead appears in the ‘Public life’ collection. It is related to a failed communication between husband and wife. It is the story of Gabriel and Greta. They go to a party during which Great suddenly hears a song that reminds her of her former boyfriend, who had died. Michael, that is the name, was her true love. But she had never talked about him with Gabriel, until that night, when they come back home. Gabriel understands that he has never been important to her and also starts to envy Michael, that had had the courage to die for love. Gabriel suddenly realizes that he wouldn’t have had the same courage, to die for someone else, to change his life. He realizes that he is a coward and that he is even more dead than Michael, because he is paralyzed. The story ends with the description of a snowfall. Snow is a symbol of the fragility. It means that the marriage was actually superficial.

Ulysses

Ulysses was published in 1922 and is divided in eighteen chapters, full of humor, inner monologues and stream of consciousness.
It takes place in a whole day, June 16th 1904, the actual day that Joyce met Nora Barnacle (his wife), the Bloom’s day.
The main characters are: Leopold Bloom (Ulysses), Stephen Daedalus (Telemacus) and Molly Bloom (Penelope).
Leopold is considered as a modern Ulysses but on the contrary of the actual Ulysses of Homer, that is a hero, Leopold is an anti hero. Joyce portraits Leopold’s life in an ordinary day. During the day he does ordinary things: he goes to the bar, he meets up with his friends and he goes to ladies. The relationship between him and his wife is actually open because they both cheat on each other. At the end of the day he comes back home and goes to bed, laying down next to his wife. In the meantime Molly is thinking about their life, too ordinary and easy. Through a precise description of each action of Leopold Joyce shows us the boredom of his life and criticizes him and the whole society.