Joyce, James - Dubliners (13)

Dubliners is a collections of 15 stories and it’s made up of 4 parts: childhood, adolescence, mature life and public life; that presented all the parts of the common life. They presented the free direct speech and the beginning in medias res. The central themes in Joyce are paralysis and escape. The former is both physical and moral. Like in Svevo we can find the figure of the “inetto” that is to say the paralyzed. The main causes of the paralysis are: family conflicts, religion, memories but also politics and culture. All these features determined the impossibility to escape of the characters, to overcome and to get rid of the chains of the life but this alternative is always destined to fail. So characters are not able to escape, they are limited and they don’t react. Another key-word in Joyce is “epiphany” that is a sudden revelation about the character or the situation where the character is, that is caused by a common object, banal gesture and everyday situations. In these short stories we can find the presence of the author and of the punctuation because it was the first step of Joyce’s process, there also no actions but the introspection of the mind’s characters; no deductive aim; subjective time taken by Bergson concept of time; the impersonality of the author so the characters are presented by themselves and as a consequence we have the regression of the language