Amabili vizi

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A Painful Case:

11. Mr. James Duffey begins a sexless affair with Mrs. Sinico, an unhappy

married woman. The two never manage to break through their inhibitions, and they stop

seeing each other. Years later, Mr. Duffey reads in the paper that Mrs. Sinico has died in a

tram accident.

Ivy Day in the Committee Room:

12. Various canvassers for different candidates meet up

in the committee room. As they talk about their work and Irish politics, a strong picture of

Irish political culture emerges.

A Mother:

13. Mrs. Kearney, a domineering and stubborn woman, becomes involved with the

Eire Abu attempts to mount a musical production. When the production flops, Mrs. Kearney

threatens to ruin the whole performance by insisting that her daughter be paid the

contractual fee promised.

Grace:

14. Mr. Kernan, a man in social decline, struggles with alcoholism. His friends plot to

him on a church retreat. When they visit Mr. Kernan in his sickbed, their wild conversation

about Church history and doctrine manages to get every central event and tenet of the

Catholic Church hopeless jumbled up.

The Dead: At their annual holiday season dance, Aunt Julia and Aunt Kate entertain a wide

15. range of guests. Among them is their nephew Gabriel, a sensitive man of letters who makes

a speech honouring his aunts. Later that night, Gabriel finds himself swept away with

passion for his wife Gretta. But when they return to their hotel room, he finds she has been

thinking about Michael Furey, her first love, who died for love of her.

About

In 1905, the young James Joyce, then only twenty-three years old, sent a manuscript of twelve short

stories to an English publisher. Delays in publishing gave Joyce ample time to add three

accomplished stories over the next two years: "Two Gallants," "A Little Cloud," and "The Dead"

were added later. Although the stories were powerful, revolutionary work, Dubliners was not

published until 1914. The delay was due to concern about the frank sexual content (which, by

today's standards, is quite mild) and some of the charged political and social issues addressed in the

collection. Dubliners is the first-born of Joyce's central canon. Though now considered a

masterpiece, its delayed publication altered its public reception. Though Joyce was astonishingly

young (twenty-five years of age at the time of the completion of "The Dead"), the collection never

saw print until he was thirty-three years old. By that time, Joyce was already publishing A Portrait

of the Artist as a Young Man in serial form in The Egoist. The stream-of-consciousness experiments

of Portrait and Ulysses attracted for more attention than the more straightforward narrative style in

Joyce's short stories. For many years, the magnificent accomplishment in Dubliners was eclipsed by

Joyce's experimental novels. Dubliners is a powerful work in its own right, containing some of the

most finely wrought short stories in the language. None of the tales show the marks of a sloppy

young writer: tone is distinctive and powerful, emotional distance is finely calibrated, and Joyce

moves easily between terse, bare-bones narrative and meticulous detail. There is no stream-of-

consciousness; in fact, protagonists (including first-person narrators) at times nearly withdraw from

the narrative, leaving the reader alone with only the basic facts of the story. Although some readers

have complained that the autobiographical Portrait tends toward self-indulgence, in Dubliners Joyce

proves his ability to enter the souls of people far removed from himself. His acute grasp of character

is everywhere, and is often displayed with a remarkable conciseness and precision. The Dublin

Joyce knew was a city in decline. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Dublin had been the 10

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second city of the British Isles and one of the ten largest cities in Europe. Charming architecture, an

elegant layout, and a bustling port made for a dynamic and agreeable urban life. But later in the

century, Belfast had outstripped her as the great city of Ireland, and the economy was in shambles.

Formerly fashionable Georgian townhouses became horrible slums, with inadequate sewage and

cramped living conditions. Her ports were in decline, and chances for advancement were slim for

the lower and middle classes. Power rested in the hands of a Protestant minority. Not surprisingly,

Dubliners dwells heavily on the themes of poverty and stagnation. Joyce sees paralysis in every

detail of Dublin's environment, from the people's faces to the dilapidated buildings, and many

characters assume that the future will be worse than the present. Most of the stories focus on

members of the lower or middle classes. This portrait of Dublin and its people is not always a

flattering one. Joyce never romanticizes poverty, and explores how need and social entrapment

adversely affect character. He sees his hometown as a city divided, often against itself, and the aura

of defeat and decline pervades every tale. He is often deeply critical of Irish provinciality, the

Catholic Church, and the Irish political climate of the time. But the collection is called Dubliners,

not Dublin. Joyce does not merely write about conditions. The real power of Dubliners is Joyce's

depiction of the strong characters who live and work in this distinctive and bleak city.

Major Themes

1. The Stages of Life: Dubliners is roughly organized into a framework chronicling a human

life: we begin with younger protagonists, and then move forward into stories with

increasingly aged men and women. Although this is a broad generalization, the stories also

tend to increase in complexity. "Araby," "An Encounter," and "Eveline," for example, are

fairly simple and short tales. "The Dead," the final tale of the collection, is nearly three

times as long as the average story in Dubliners. It is also the richest of the stories, weaving

together many of the previous themes of the book. Joyce's portrait of Dublin life moves not

only across a small range of classes (the poor and the middle class) but also across the

different periods of a human life.

2. Poverty and Class Differences: Poverty is one of the most pervasive themes of the novel.

Joyce usually evokes it through detail: the plum cake Maria busy in "Clay," for example, is a

humble treat that costs her a good chunk of her salary. Characters rail against their poverty.

Lenehan in "Two Gallants" sees no future for himself, and sits down to a miserable supper

consisting only of peas and ginger beer. Farrington of "Counterparts" stays in a hateful job

because he has no other options. His misery is such that he ends up spending far more than

he can afford on booze. We catch glimpses of slums, as in "An Encounter," when the two

young schoolboys see poor children without fully comprehending what their ragged clothes

imply about the small children's home conditions and prospects in life. Dublin's poor

economy is also the reason why characters must fret about keeping even miserable jobs.

Poverty is never pretty in Dubliners. For every gentle, poor soul like Maria, there are

numerous revolting characters like Corley and Lenehan of "Two Gallants." Joyce explores

the negative affects poverty has on the character.

3. Colonization and Irish Politics: Dublin is a defeated city, the old capitol of a conquered

nation. At the time of the stories, she is even more so: the Irish political world is still

suffering from the loss of the nationalist movement's greatest leader, Charles Stewart

Parnell. Joyce does not exactly write to rally; his appraisal of the state of Irish politics and

the effects of colonization on the Irish psyche are both quite bleak. Nor does he agree with

many of the policies and cultural initiatives embraced by some nationalists: he was no fan of

the Irish language movement, and he was unimpressed by a good deal of the Irish art being

produced in his period. 11

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4. Defeat, Powerlessness, Stasis, Imprisonment, and Paralysis: These five themes are

closely connected. The colonization of Ireland is paralleled by the sense of defeat and

powerlessness in the lives of individuals. In many stories, characters are so trapped by their

conditions that struggling seems pointless. In "Counterparts," for example, Farrington is

allowed one moment of triumph when he publicly humiliates his tyrannical boss. But for

that one moment, Farrington is made to grovel in private, and he knows afterward that his

life at work will become even more unpleasant. Joyce conveys this powerlessness through

stasis. In Dublin, not much moves. At times the paralysis is literal: note Father Flynn in "The

Sisters." At other times, the stasis is a state of life, as with the frustrated Little Chandler of

"A Little Cloud." This feeling of stasis is closely connected to a feeling that Dublin is a kind

of prison. Many characters feel trapped. We begin with a paralyzed priest in "The Sisters,"

followed by frustrated schoolboys trapped by Dublin's tedium in "An Encounter," followed

by a boy without the means to indulge his fantasies in "Araby," followed by a young woman

crushed by the stifling conditions that entrap her at home in "Eveline" . . . most of the

characters are is some way imprisoned. The entrapment is often caused by a combination of

circumstances: poverty, social pressure, and family situation. Sometimes, the imprisonment

comes from the guile of another character, as with the hapless Mr. Doran in "The Boarding

House." The frustration caused by this stasis, impotence, and imprisonment has a horrible

effect on the human spirit. Often, the weak in Dubliners deal with their frustration by

bullying the still weaker. Mahony of "An Encounter" picks on small children and animals,

Little Chandler and Farrington, in two back-to-back stories, take out their frustrations on

their children.

5. Longing for Escape: The natural complement to the above themes. Its first expression

comes from the boys of "An Encounter," whose dreams of the American Wild West provide

an escape from the tedium of Dublin. Unfortunately, most of the characters are unable to

escape. Eveline finds herself too frightened to leave Ireland; Farrington finds even alcohol

unsatisfying; Little Chandler realizes he'll never find the focus to be a poet. The greatest

barrier to escape is sometime psychological, as it is with Eveline. Escape is also a central

theme of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. As an Irish writer who lived most of his

adult life abroad, Joyce was obsessed with the liberating effects of fleeing Ireland, and he

transfers that obsession, in one form or another, onto many of the characters in Dubliners.

6. Isolation: Dubliners has some profoundly lonely characters in it, but the theme of isolation

does not end there. Isolation is not only a matter of living alone; it comes from the

recognition that a man or woman's subjectivity is only their own, inaccessible to all others.

Failed communication is common throughout the stories. In other stories, conversations are

striking for how little meaningful communication takes place. The supreme example of this

theme in Dubliners comes in the dead, when Gabriel and Gretta leave the party. While

Gabriel thinks about his life with Gretta and how much he desires her, Gretta cannot stop

thinking about the young boy, her first love, who died for need of her. Husband and wife

have been in the same room, but they may as well have been on different planets.

7. Mortality: Mortality is another theme, a natural result of Joyce's stages-of-life structure.

But the stories at the end of the collection, where the characters tend to be older, are not the

only ones to deal with mortality. Dubliners begins with "The Sisters," a story about a young

child's first intimate experience with death. Thus the collection begins and ends with the

theme of mortality. The preoccupation with mortality puts a bleak spin on the themes of

stasis and paralysis: although it often feels in Dublin like time isn't moving, Joyce reminds