Joyce, James - Dubliners, analysis (2)

Joyce - Dubliners, analysis

Beetween 1916 and 1921 there was the Irish war of indipendence. In this period a nationalism was born, which wanted to rediscover the Celtic culture, for example Celtic mitology, eliminated from the Anglo-Saxon one. This movement was called Irish Literary Revival.
Joyce was against this movement because it was too Romantic and too obsessed with the past. Joyce also thought that this movement didn’t tell the truth. Instead the Irish writers who have influenced Joyce were Ibsen, who exposed the hypocrise of the middle classe of the time, and Zole, who talked about Paris.

Dublin wasn’t a happy place because of three institutions: family, church and policy. Dubliners were dominated and paralyzed by these institutions, in fact many characters in the book try to escape from Dublin, but they can’t because they’re paralyzed.
Joyce talked about simple people through a monotonous style, as their lives. In fact style reflects content: the style was simple because Joyce talked about simple people and the style was monotonous because their lives were monotonous.
Dubliners is made by 15 stories divided in 4 groups: the first group talked from the point of view of children, the second from the point of view of teenagers, the third from the point of view of adults and the third from the point of view of public life. This is the application of Giordano Bruno’s multiperspectivity. The last story was entitled Death and the last word of the book is dead: Joyce meant to say that Dubliners were morally dead.
Dubliners was published in a magazine, but after the fifth episode the magazine refused to publish Joyce’s work because it was to negative. So the writer decided to escape from Dublin because there was no freedom of expression.