The Literary Legacy of Joyce: From Ireland to the World

Joyce's life-changing decision

Joyce is the first and the most important

This meeting will change his life because they loved a lot and together decided to move to Italy and in particular they settled down in Trieste, after a long period in which they decided to get married. They also had two children to whom they gave Italian names (Giorgio and Lucia).
In Trieste, Joyce met Italo Svevo and they started a really important friendship. Joyce, in this period, had a lot of financial problems. Even if he published his first novel, it was not enough to get on living. Then because of the war, he and his family were forced to move to Zurig to be safe.

His first important work is called Dubliners, a collection of fifteen short stories. Another important novel is A portrait of an artist as a young man, in which he is the protagonist, so it's a semi-autobiographical novel. But his masterpiece is considered Ulysses, in which he used a massive use of the stream of consciousness technique and here we can find the new idea of time: Ulysses, in fact takes place in just one day, but the pages of the book are about 500. The last work, it's Finnegans Wake, that is still under studies, it's impossible to understand the meaning, it's very complex because he wrote it in a lot of languages: Latin, Greeks, Sanscreet, Italian.

Themes and style in Joyce's work

The theme he deals with is Dublin, he spent all his life writing and thinking about Dublin. He describes Dublin in an ordinary way to show reality as it really was in Dublin. The style is relatively simple because he wanted to reproduce the exact way of living in that city and also the type of life held by Dubliners. The style is increasingly more complex even within the Dubliners because it suits the character: if the character is a child, the language and the style is relatively simple but when the character grows up it becomes more complex. Moreover, every single episode of the Dubliners is an epiphany.

Understanding epiphany

What is the

It is a sudden revelation, an understanding of a reality in its full significance and meaning, a kind of out of darkness: in a moment of trouble, epiphany is the moment you understand, the moment in which you have the idea. Even something trivial, a banal event may happen but even if it is simple, it is important for our mind, because it tells our mind to understand and take a decision. Joyce studied at the Jesuit school so he had a catholic education and in A portrait of an artist as a young man, it's said that he mostly spent his early part of life, asking himself if he was destined to be a priest or a writer, this was his crucial point. But then watching the lake, he had the epiphany, he said: "I will not serve, I will accept the call of life to create life out of life". Thanks to the epiphany, he understood that in his future he had to be a writer.