7 James Joyce: Dubliners

Dr. Suja Kurup

Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. They form a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by various converging ideas and influences. They centre on Joyce’s idea of an epiphany: a moment where a character experiences a life-changing self-understanding or illumination. Many of the characters in Dubliners later appear in minor roles in Joyce’s novel Ulysses. The initial stories in the collection are narrated by child protagonists, and as the stories continue, they deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people. This is in line with Joyce’s tripartite division of the collection into childhood, adolescence and maturity.

Style

In Dubliners, Joyce rarely uses hyperbole, relying on simplicity and close detail to create a realistic setting. This ties the reader’s understanding of people to their environments. Additionally, Joyce’s prose does not pressure characters into thinking a certain way; rather they are left to come to their own conclusions. This trait of Dubliners is even more evident when contrasted with moral judgements displayed in the works of earlier writers such as Charles Dickens. This frequently leads to a lack of traditional dramatic resolution within the stories.

It has been argued that Joyce often allows his narrative voice to gravitate towards the voice of a textual character. For example, the opening line of “The Dead” reads “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.” She is not, in this instance, “literally” run off her feet, and neither would Joyce have thought so; rather, the narrative lends itself to a use of language typical of the character being described. Joyce often uses descriptions from the characters’ point of view, although he very rarely writes in the first person. This can be seen in “Eveline”: “Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne.” Here, Joyce employs an empirical perspective in his description of characters and events; an understanding of characters’ personalities is often gained through an analysis of their possessions. The first paragraph of “A Painful Case” is an example of this style, as well as Joyce’s use of global to local description of the character’s possessions.

Joyce also employs parodies of other writing styles; part of “A Painful Case” is written as a newspaper story, and part of “Grace” is written as a sermon. This stylistic motif may also be seen in Ulysses (for example, in the Aeolus episode, which is written in a newspaper style), and is indicative of a sort of blending of narrative with textual circumstances. The collection as a whole displays an overall plan, beginning with stories of youth and progressing in age to culminate in “The Dead”. Great emphasis is laid upon the specific geographic details of Dublin, details to which a reader with some knowledge of the area would be able to directly relate. The multiple perspectives presented throughout the collection serve to contrast the characters in Dublin at this time.

Context

James Joyce was born into a middle-class, Catholic family in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, on February 2, 1882. The family’s prosperity dwindled soon after Joyce’s birth, forcing them to move from their comfortable home to the unfashionable and impoverished area of North Dublin. Nonetheless, Joyce attended a prestigious Jesuit school and went on to study philosophy and languages at University College, Dublin. He moved to Paris after graduation in 1902 to pursue medical school, but instead he turned his attention to writing. In 1903 he returned to Dublin, where he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle, the following year. From then on, Joyce made his home in other countries. From 1905 to 1915 he and Nora lived in Rome and Trieste, Italy, and from 1915 to 1919 they lived in Zurich, Switzerland. Between World War I and World War II, they lived in Paris. They returned to Zurich in 1940, where Joyce died in 1941.

In 1907, at the age of twenty-five, Joyce published Chamber Music, a collection of poetry. Previously, he had also written a short-story collection, Dubliners, which was published in 1914. Though Joyce had written the book years earlier, the stories contained characters and events that were alarmingly similar to real people and places, raising concerns about libel. Joyce indeed based many of the characters in Dubliners on real people, and such suggestive details, coupled with the book’s historical and geographical precision and piercing examination of relationships, flustered anxious publishers. Joyce’s autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man followed Dubliners in 1916, and a play, Exiles, followed in 1918. Joyce is most famous for his later experimental novels, Ulysses (1922), which maps the Dublin wanderings of its protagonist in a single day, and Finnegans Wake (1939). These two works emblematize his signature stream-of-consciousness prose style, which mirrors characters’ thoughts without the limitations of traditional narrative, a style he didn’t use in Dubliners.

Ireland permeates all of Joyce’s writing, especially Ireland during the tumultuous early twentieth century. The political scene at that time was uncertain but hopeful, as Ireland sought independence from Great Britain. The nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell, who became active in the 1870s, had reinvigorated Irish politics with his proposed Home Rule Bill, which aimed to give Ireland a greater voice in British government. Parnell, dubbed the “Uncrowned King of Ireland,” was hugely popular in Ireland, both for his anti-English views and his support of land ownership for farmers. In 1889, however, his political career collapsed when his adulterous affair with the married Kitty O’Shea was made public. Kitty’s husband had known for years about the affair, but instead of making it public, he attempted to use it to his political and financial advantage. He waited until he filed for divorce to expose the affair. Both Ireland and England were scandalized, Parnell refused to resign, and his career never recovered. Parnell died in 1891, when Joyce was nine years old.

In the last part of the nineteenth century, after Parnell’s death, Ireland underwent a dramatic cultural revival. Irish citizens struggled to define what it meant to be Irish, and a movement began to reinvigorate Irish language and culture. The movement celebrated Irish literature and encouraged people to learn the Irish language, which many people were forgoing in favour of the more modern English language. Ultimately, the cultural revival of the late nineteenth century gave the Irish a greater sense of pride in their identity.

Despite the cultural revival, the bitter publicity surrounding Parnell’s affair, and later his death, dashed all hopes of Irish independence and unity. Ireland splintered into factions of Protestants and Catholics, Conservatives and Nationalists. Such social forces form a complex context for Joyce’s writing, which repeatedly taps into political and religious matters. Since Joyce spent little of his later life in Ireland, he did not witness such debates firsthand. However, despite living on the continent, Joyce retained his artistic interest in the city and country of his birth and ably articulated the Irish experience in his writings.

Dubliners contains fifteen portraits of life in the Irish capital. Joyce focuses on children and adults who skirt the middle class, such as housemaids, office clerks, music teachers, students, shop girls, swindlers, and out-of-luck businessmen. Joyce envisioned his collection as a looking glass with which the Irish could observe and study themselves. In most of the stories, Joyce uses a detached but highly perceptive narrative voice that displays these lives to the reader in precise detail. Rather than present intricate dramas with complex plots, these stories sketch daily situations in which not much seems to happen—a boy visits a bazaar, a woman buys sweets for holiday festivities, a man reunites with an old friend over a few drinks. Though these events may not appear profound, the characters’ intensely personal and often tragic revelations certainly are. The stories in Dubliners peer into the homes, hearts, and minds of people whose lives connect and intermingle through the shared space and spirit of Dublin. A character from one story will mention the name of a character in another story, and stories often have settings that appear in other stories. Such subtle connections create a sense of shared experience and evoke a map of Dublin life that Joyce would return to again and again in his later works.

Plot Overview and Critical Analysis“The Sisters”

As the first story in Dubliners, “The Sisters” introduces many of the themes and motifs that will recur throughout the book, linking its component parts together into something that is not quite a novel but more than a mere collection of short stories. The themes that emerge here include paralysis, corruption, and death.

“An Encounter”

In this story, the unnamed storyteller recalls a transformative boyhood experience. The truants in “An Encounter” managed to play hooky from school without any major consequences; no one prevented them from journeying across town on a weekday or even asked the boys where they were going. Similarly, the young protagonist of this story leaves his house after nine o’clock at night, when “people are in bed and after their first sleep,” and travels through the city in darkness with the assent of his guardians.

“Araby”

Like the two previous stories, “The Sisters” and “An Encounter,” “Araby” is about a somewhat introverted boy fumbling toward adulthood with little in the way of guidance from family or community. Like “An Encounter,” “Araby” takes the form of a quest — a journey in search of something precious or even sacred. Once again, the quest is ultimately in vain.

In addition to being an artist of the highest order, Joyce was also a consummate craftsman. He guides his readers through the story itself, thereby seducing them into considering his themes. For example, in this story he offers a main character who elicits sympathy because of his sensitivity and loneliness.

Though all are written from the first-person point-of-view, or perspective, in none of the first three stories in Dubliners is the young protagonist himself telling the story, exactly. It is instead the grown-up version of each boy who recounts “The Sisters,” “An Encounter,” and “Araby.” This is shown by the language used and the insights included in these stories. A young boy would never have the wisdom or the vocabulary to say “I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity.” The man that the boy grew into, however, is fully capable of recognizing and expressing such a sentiment. Joyce’s point-of-view strategy thereby allows the reader to examine the feelings of his young protagonists while experiencing those feelings in all their immediate, overwhelming pain.

“Eveline” 

Though short and easy to read, this story is devastating, possibly the most powerful in the book. (The other candidate for that honour would be “The Dead.”) It is yet another Dubliners tale about paralysis, as Eveline stands on the pier at story’s end, frozen in place by fear and guilt.

Death pervades “Eveline” too: the deaths of her mother and her brother Ernest, and of a girlhood friend named Tizzie Dunn. And of course, Eveline fears her own death: “he would drown her,” she thinks of Frank, defying logic. Incidentally, this is the third Dubliners story in a row about a failed quest.

“After the Race” 

Unlike most of the other stories in Dubliners, “After the Race” is not highly regarded by most critics, who believe that Joyce was describing here a social class (the very wealthy) about which he knew very little. Still, it is consistent with the other stories in the collection with regard to both theme and symbolism. Jimmy illustrates the theme of paralysis by not progressing in any real way.

“Two Gallants”

In this story, Joyce reiterates the motif of a circular path that leads nowhere, introduced by implication in “After the Race.” The author is even more compulsive than usual at including actual Dublin place names in “Two Gallants” — to a fault, perhaps. He does so partly to stress the story’s veracity. These events could really happen, Joyce is telling us — maybe they did! But he also does this so that readers familiar with the city’s geography would recognize that Lenehan, who will reappear in Joyce’s novel Ulysses, ends his evening’s odyssey not far from where he began it. In keeping with a common theme in Dubliners, “Two Gallants” lays blame with the Catholic Church for Irish paralysis

“The Boarding House”More paralysis, death, and corruption — and more symbolism and storytelling craftsmanship — are evident in “The Boarding House.” As in “An Encounter,” “Araby,” “Eveline,” and “After the Race,” a character in “The Boarding House” (Polly) ventures forth — to her typist’s job at the corn-factor’s — only to return home without having achieved the object of her quest

Joyce’s private system of colour symbolism (yellows and browns indicating decay) is used again in “The Boarding House.” Joyce excelled not only at the art of fiction, but (as in “Araby”) at the craft of storytelling, too. Much of this tale’s drama is lent to it by the fact that Joyce tells it from three different points-of-view, in series. This is the first story in Dubliners told from more than one perspective. “The Sisters,” “An Encounter,” and “Araby” were of course limited to the perspectives of their first-person narrator. “Eveline,” “After the Race,” and “Two Gallants” are told from the third-person point-of-view, but the reader never knows what anyone beside Eveline, Jimmy, and Lenehan is thinking or feeling. Here, ever so subtly, Joyce expands his canvas, becoming more novelistic — more like the writer of the sprawling, panoramic novel Ulysses, at least with respect to point of view.

“A Little Cloud”

This story reiterates the dynamic of “An Encounter,” “Araby,” and “Eveline,” as Little Chandler sets out seeking Gallaher and all he represents, only to return home defeated. It also resembles “After the Race” in that Little Chandler quests like Jimmy for European sophistication and winds up as provincial as ever. At the same time, parallels exist between Little Chandler/Gallaher and Lenehan/Corley from “Two Gallants.” The first member of each set is so misguided that he admires and hopes to emulate the second — though Gallaher, like Corley, is spiritually dead.

A new twist, not seen in other Dubliners tales, is the notion that escapes from Ireland does not necessarily equal salvation. Again, Joyce conceived Dubliners as an integral work of fiction, not merely a collection of stories. Techniques such as these lend the volume coherence.

“Counterparts”

The line “He had done for himself in the office, pawned his watch, spent all his money; and he had not even got drunk” sums up Farrington’s pervasive impotence. The beating of his young son in the story’s final scene dramatizes his relationship to his children and, probably, his wife. Like “Eveline,” this story shows how intractable Irish paralysis seemed to Joyce — impossible to ameliorate, much less escape altogether.. As ever, the author subtly holds the English and the Roman Catholic Church accountable. More than in any Dubliners story yet, Ireland seems here to be a country under extended occupation by foreigners.

“Clay”

Some critics have interpreted Maria as a symbol of Ireland itself (which would link her, unpredictably, with the pervert from “An Encounter”). Maria is poor and relatively forsaken. She is in thrall to the Roman Catholic Church (setting her alarm an hour earlier than usual so that she can attend All Saints’ Day Mass the next morning), and she loses her gift while distracted by a “colonel-looking gentleman” who might represent England.

Like “A Little Cloud” and “Counterparts,” “Clay” employs the limited third-person point-of-view strategy. That is, although Maria does not herself tell the story, the reader is privy to her thoughts and no other characters’. The story’s narrator never tells anything that Maria does not know, as a traditional omniscient narrator almost certainly would.

“A Painful Case”

Like “Eveline,” this is a story of missed opportunity, and true to its title, “A Painful Case” is perhaps even more agonizing to read than that earlier selection. As in the earlier story, Joyce seemingly intends the reader to believe that such an opportunity will never come again.

In some ways, “A Painful Case” is the most sophisticated and complex Dubliners story yet, as it achieves its powerful effect through a deft combination of storytelling techniques and symbolism. As in “A Little Cloud,” “Counterparts,” and “Clay,” Joyce employs the limited third- person point-of-view, allowing access to his protagonist’s thoughts and feelings while keeping the reader distant enough from the main character to realize the errors of the protagonist’s ways before the protagonist does. (The reader knows, for example, that it is a terrible mistake for Duffy to terminate his relationship with Mrs. Sinico.)Unlike the stories “A Little Cloud,” “Counterparts,” and “Clay,” however, “A Painful Case” includes information that was initially beyond the perspective of its protagonist.

“Ivy Day in the Committee Room”

Though it was Joyce’s favourite of the tales in Dubliners, “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” is a difficult story for most American readers to comprehend, thanks to its excess of Irish slang and references to turn-of-the-century Irish politics. However, the fact that most of the story is told by means of dialogue rather than narrative — an unusual, even radical, approach at the time “Ivy Day” was written — should be appreciated. Like the prior story (“A Painful Case”), it also includes a document quoted at length in place of a conventional, dramatic climax.

The story is for the most part a naturalistic one with little in the way of overt symbolism, and yet “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” reiterates the themes of corruption and death introduced in the collection’s first story, “The Sisters.”

Ivy Day is the anniversary of the death of Charles Parnell, the Nationalist and “uncrowned king of Ireland” whom the Irish turned on when his affair with a married woman came to light — thus further delaying Irish independence.

“A Mother”

“A Mother” is a relatively straightforward and easy-to-read Dubliners selection that provides comic relief before the last two stories in the collection. Although this story is light in tone, it nevertheless reiterates Joyce’s main theme of paralysis.

“A Mother” also returns to the theme of corruption.

“Grace”

This story is much like “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” in that it takes place for the most part in one room and is conveyed mainly by means of dialogue. This is the most novelistic story in the collection, except for “The Dead.” Not only is “Grace” longer than the stories that come before it, it also uses techniques such as three separate scenes and a truly omniscient point-of- view. These are techniques associated more with novels than with short stories. Fittingly, Kernan himself, as well as Cunningham and M’Coy appear in Joyce’s great novel Ulysses.

“The Dead”

By general consensus, this is the greatest of all the stories in Dubliners — the longest, richest, and most emotionally affecting — and the story more than any other that points toward Joyce’s career as one of the English language’s greatest novelists ever. He would follow this book with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. The story also reiterates  the great themes of Dubliners.

Though “The Dead” includes much believable dialogue, it is the story in all of Dubliners with  the most — and the most evocative — descriptions. For example, Joyce uses closely observed details to add to the reader’s understanding of the story’s characters.

Joyce also uses description for pacing; the author cinematically cuts away to the ordinary objects within the room during the story’s enormously dramatic penultimate scene. The result is that the already considerable dramatic tension of “The Dead” actually increases: “A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side.”

As effective as the combination of theme, symbolism, dialogue, and description were in the prior story, “Grace,” they mix here to yield something even more impressive: a story that begins simply, builds slowly, eventually grows hypnotic in its power, and ends in a truly heartrending burst of emotion. “The Dead” is unforgettable, and it launches the reader from this collection of carefully wrought and closely joined stories (the world of Dubliners) into the world of Joyce’s remarkable novels.

Themes in Dubliners

The Prison of Routine

Restrictive routines and the repetitive, mundane details of everyday life mark the lives of Joyce’s Dubliners and trap them in circles of frustration, restraint, and violence. Routine affects characters who face difficult predicaments, but it also affects characters who have little open conflict in their lives. The young boy of “An Encounter” yearns for a respite from the rather innocent routine of school, only to find himself sitting in a field listening to a man recycle disturbing thoughts. In “Counterparts,” Farrington, who makes a living copying documents, demonstrates the dangerous potential of repetition. Farrington’s work mirrors his social and home life, causing his anger—and abusive behavior—to worsen. Farrington, with his explosive physical reactions, illustrates more than any other character the brutal ramifications of a repetitive existence.

The most consistent consequences of following mundane routines are loneliness and unrequited love. In “Araby,” a young boy wants to go to the bazaar to buy a gift for the girl he loves, but he is late because his uncle becomes mired in the routine of his workday. In “A Painful Case” Mr. Duffy’s obsession with his predictable life costs him a golden chance at love. Eveline, in the story that shares her name, gives up her chance at love by choosing her familiar life over an unknown adventure, even though her familiar routines are tinged with sadness and abuse. The circularity of these Dubliners’ lives effectively traps them, preventing them from being receptive to new experiences and happiness.

The Desire for Escape

The characters in Dubliners may be citizens of the Irish capital, but many of them long for escape and adventure in other countries. Such longings, however, are never actually realized by the stories’ protagonists. The schoolboy yearning for escape and Wild West excitement in “An Encounter” is relegated to the imagination and to the confines of Dublin, while Eveline’s hopes for a new life in Argentina dissolve on the docks of the city’s river. Little Chandler enviously fantasizes about the London press job of his old friend and his travels to liberal cities like Paris, but the shame he feels about such desires stops him from taking action to pursue similar goals. More often than offering a literal escape from a physical place, the stories tell of opportunities to escape from smaller, more personal restraints. Eveline, for example, seeks release from domestic duties through marriage. In “Two Gallants,” Lenehan wishes to escape his life of schemes, but he cannot take action to do so. Mr. Doran wishes to escape marrying Polly in “A Boarding House,” but he knows he must relent. The impulse to escape from unhappy situations defines Joyce’s Dubliners, as does the inability to actually undertake the process.

The Intersection of Life and Death

Dubliners opens with “The Sisters,” which explores death and the process of remembering the dead, and closes with “The Dead,” which invokes the quiet calm of snow that covers both the dead and the living. These stories bookend the collection and emphasize its consistent focus on the meeting point between life and death. Encounters between the newly dead and the living, such as in “The Sisters” and “A Painful Case,” explicitly explore this meeting point, showing what kind of aftershocks a death can have for the living. Mr. Duffy, for example, re evaluates his life after learning about Mrs. Sinico’s death in “A Painful Case,” while the narrator of “The Sisters” doesn’t know what to feel upon the death of the priest. In other stories, including “Eveline,” “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” and “The Dead,” memories of the dead haunt the living and colour every action. In “Ivy Day,” for example, Parnell hovers in the political talk.

The dead cast a shadow on the present, drawing attention to the mistakes and failures that people make generation after generation. Such overlap underscores Joyce’s interest in life cycles and their repetition, and also his concern about those “living dead” figures like Maria in “Clay” who move through life with little excitement or emotion except in reaction to everyday snags and delays. The monotony of Dublin life leads Dubliners to live in a suspended state between life and death, in which each person has a pulse but is incapable of profound, life-sustaining action.

Motifs

Paralysis

In most of the stories in Dubliners, a character has a desire, faces obstacles to it, then ultimately relents and suddenly stops all action. These moments of paralysis show the characters’ inability to change their lives and reverse the routines that hamper their wishes. Such immobility fixes the Dubliners in cycles of experience. The young boy in “Araby” halts in the middle of the dark bazaar, knowing that he will never escape the tedious delays of Dublin and attain love. Eveline freezes like an animal, fearing the possible new experience of life away from home. These moments evoke the theme of death in life as they show characters in a state of inaction and numbness. The opening story introduces this motif through the character of Father Flynn, whose literal paralysis traps him in a state suspended between life and death. Throughout the collection, this stifling state appears as part of daily life in Dublin, which all Dubliners ultimately acknowledge and accept.

Epiphany 

Characters in Dubliners experience both great and small revelations in their everyday lives, moments that Joyce himself referred to as “epiphanies,” a word with connotations of religious revelation. These epiphanies do not bring new experiences and the possibility of reform, as one might expect such moments to. Rather, these epiphanies allow characters to better understand their particular circumstances, usually rife with sadness and routine, which they then return to with resignation and frustration. Sometimes epiphanies occur only on the narrative level, serving as signposts to the reader that a story’s character has missed a moment of self-reflection. For example, in “Clay,” during the Halloween game when Maria touches the clay, which signifies an early death, she thinks nothing of it, overlooking a moment that could have revealed something about herself or the people around her. “Araby,” “Eveline,” “A Little Cloud,” “A Painful Case,” and “The Dead” all conclude with epiphanies that the characters fully register, yet these epiphanies are tinged with frustration, sadness, and regret. At the end of “The Dead,” Gabriel’s revelation clarifies the connection between the dead and the living, an epiphany that resonates throughout Dubliners as a whole. The epiphany motif highlights the repeated routine of hope and passive acceptance that marks each of these portraits, as well as the general human condition.

Betrayal

Deception, deceit, and treachery scar nearly every relationship in the stories in Dubliners, demonstrating the unease with which people attempt to connect with each other, both platonically and romantically. In “The Boarding House,” Mrs. Mooney traps Mr. Doran into marrying her daughter Polly, and Mr. Doran dreads the union but will meet his obligation to pursue it. In “Two Gallants,” Lenehan and Corley both suspect each other of cheating and scheming, though they join forces to swindle innocent housemaids out of their livelihoods. Concerns about betrayal frame the conversations in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” particularly as Parnell’s supporters see his demise as the result of pro-British treachery. Until his affair was exposed, Parnell had been a popular and influential politician, and many Irish believe the British were responsible for his downfall. All of the men in “Ivy Day” display wavering beliefs that suggest betrayal looms in Ireland’s political present. In “The Dead,” Gabriel feels betrayed by his wife’s emotional outpouring for a former lover. This feeling evokes not only the sense of displacement and humiliation that all of these Dubliners fear but also the tendency for people to categorize many acts as “betrayal” in order to shift blame from themselves onto others.

Religion

References to priests, religious belief, and spiritual experience appear throughout the stories in Dubliners and ultimately paint an unflattering portrait of religion. In the first story, “The Sisters,” Father Flynn cannot keep a strong grip on the chalice and goes mad in a confessional box. This story marks religion’s first appearance as a haunting but incompetent and dangerous component of Dublin life. The strange man of “An Encounter” wears the same clothing as Father Flynn, connecting his lascivious behavior, however remotely, to the Catholic Church. In “Grace,” Father Purdon shares his name with Dublin’s red-light district, one of many subtle ironies in that story. In “Grace,” Tom Kernan’s fall and absent redemption highlight the pretension and inefficacy of religion—religion is just another daily ritual of repetition that advances no one. In other stories, such as “Araby,” religion acts as a metaphor for dedication that dwindles. The presence of so many religious references also suggests that religion traps Dubliners into thinking about their lives after death.

Major Symbols

Windows

Windows in Dubliners consistently evoke the anticipation of events or encounters that are about to happen. For example, the narrator in “The Sisters” looks into a window each night, waiting for signs of Father Flynn’s death, and the narrator in “Araby” watches from his parlor window for the appearance of Mangan’s sister. The suspense for these young boys centers in that space separating the interior life from the exterior life. Windows also mark the threshold between domestic space and the outside world, and through them the characters in Dubliners observe  their own lives as well as the lives of others. Both Eveline and Gabriel turn to windows when they reflect on their own situations, both of which center on the relationship between the individual and the individual’s place in a larger context.

Dusk and Nighttime 

Joyce’s Dublin is perpetually dark. No streams of sunlight or cheery landscapes illuminate these stories. Instead, a spectrum of grey and black underscores their somber tone. Characters walk through Dublin at dusk, an in-between time that hovers between the activity of day and the stillness of night, and live their most profound moments in the darkness of late hours. These dark backdrops evoke the half-life or in-between state the characters in Dubliners occupy, both physically and emotionally, suggesting the intermingling of life and death that marks every story. In this state, life can exist and proceed, but the darkness renders Dubliners’ experiences dire and doomed.

Food 

Nearly all of the characters in Dubliners eat or drink, and in most cases food serves as a reminder of both the threatening dullness of routine and the joys and difficulties of togetherness. In “A Painful Case,” Mr. Duffy’s solitary, duplicated meals are finally interrupted by the shocking newspaper article that reports Mrs. Sinico’s death. This interruption makes him realize that his habits isolate him from the love and happiness of “life’s feast.” The party meal in “The Dead” might evoke conviviality, but the rigid order of the rich table instead suggests military battle. In “Two Gallants,” Lenehan’s quiet meal of peas and ginger beer allows him to dwell on his self- absorbed life, so lacking in meaningful relationships and security, while the constant imbibing in “After the Race” fuels Jimmy’s attempts to convince himself he belongs with his upper-class companions. Food in Dubliners allows Joyce to portray his characters and their experiences through a substance that both sustains life yet also symbolizes its restraints.

Setting

The setting of Dubliners is, logically enough, in and around the city of Dublin, Ireland. Though the capital city of Ireland, the Dublin in which Joyce grew up was a provincial place — far less cosmopolitan than a number of other Western European cities of similar size (Venice, for instance). Unlike France, Spain, and Italy, Ireland had never been a centre of continental culture; unlike England and the Netherlands, it had never been a trade hub. Nor, in contrast to then recently united Germany, was Ireland yet industrialized. (In fact, the country would remain almost exclusively rural for decades to come.) It was a kind of third-world nation, really, before the term existed. Though Dublin was a genuinely urban locale, with electric lights and streetcars, competing daily newspapers and even a museum, the city remained fairly unsophisticated at the time when Joyce wrote about it.

To some degree, this was a function of Ireland’s geographical remoteness from the rest of the continent in the days before radio and air travel (much less television and the Internet). It is an island off an island (Britain) off the coast of Europe, and therefore somewhat inaccessible. James Joyce himself, however, blamed two other factors for the backwardness of his home city: the Roman Catholic Church and the neighboring country of England.

According to legend, St. Patrick had brought Christianity to Ireland in the Middle Ages; ever since, most Irish have observed a rigorous and rather literal brand of the religion, one that is perhaps more superstitious than the Christianity practiced by French Catholics, for instance. In story after story in Dubliners as well as in the novels he wrote later in his career, Joyce holds the Roman Catholic Church accountable for the failure of the Irish to advance in step with the rest of Europe. He was particularly bitter about the way in which the Church often recruited  intellectuals like himself to serve in the priesthood — rather than encouraging them to use their minds in the service of progress, as doctors, scientists, or engineers.

Joyce also blamed England for what he saw as Ireland’s backwardness. On July 1, 1690, at the Battle of the Boyne, the Protestant forces of King William III of England had defeated the Roman Catholic Jacobites of James II, causing the downfall of Catholic Ireland. Until 1922, when British Parliament granted independence to the country (while retaining control of what is to this day the province of Northern Ireland, the inhabitants of which tend to be Protestant rather than Catholic), Joyce’s homeland would remain, in effect, a colony of England. Joyce and many other Irish saw this era of over 200 years as one of outright occupation by an overtly hostile enemy.

The period during which Dubliners is set follows the brutal so-called Potato Famine of the late 1840s — for which many Irish held the British responsible — after which a movement for Irish independence (led by the nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell) occurred. This movement, however, failed ignominiously when Parnell was betrayed by his own countrymen, and in the Dublin of Joyce’s novels, the defeat still stings. (For evidence of this, see “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.”) The Irish Revival, a movement begun in the 1880s to foster understanding and respect for Celtic and Gaelic language and culture, is referred to in Dubliners as well (in “A Mother” and “The Dead”). From the very first story onward, the book is rife with examples, obvious and less so, of the treachery of England and the English, at least in the opinion of Joyce and his characters.

The stories of Dubliners are united by the city itself — Dublin is rendered in Joyce’s book with a concreteness and specificity that was unprecedented at the time of its writing. The other aspect that unites these disparate works of narrative prose is shared themes. Though the protagonist of “Araby” and that of “Clay” could hardly be more different with respect to age and temperament (the same goes for the main characters of “Eveline” and “The Dead”), all these stories are united by the ideas that the tales dramatize: paralysis, corruption, and death. In story after Dubliners story, characters fail to move forward, tending rather to forge outward and then retreat, or else circle endlessly. They are stuck in place. Examples of corruption — that is, contamination, deterioration, perversity, and depravity — occur throughout. Finally, Dubliners begins with a death and ends with a death (in a story titled, logically enough, “The Dead”), with numerous deaths either dramatized or referred to in between.

All of this knits the book’s many and varied stories together in a web of place, time, and meaning. Each successive story gains in momentum and weight by virtue of following those that came before. (For instance, Gabriel Conroy from “The Dead” is more completely understood if thought of as the grown-up protagonist of “Araby.”) And after reading the book, it will be hard to think of one Dubliners tale without remembering others.