Dubliners

Dubliners

The title page of the first edition in 1914 of Dubliners.
Author	James Joyce
Language	English
Genre	Short Story
Publisher	Grant Richards Ltd., London
Publication date	1914
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback) and Audio book
Pages	Approx. 160 pages
ISBN	ISBN 0-486-26870-5
Followed by	Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

For the Irish folk band, see The Dubliners.

Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914.

The fifteen stories were meant to be a naturalistic depiction of the Irish middle class life living in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.

The stories were written at the time 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 center around Joyce's idea of an epiphany: a moment where a character has a special moment of self-understanding or illumination. Many of the characters in Dubliners later appear in minor roles in Joyce's novel Ulysses. [1]

The initial stories in the collection are narrated by children as protagonists, and as the stories continue they deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people.

The stories

• The Sisters – The priest Father Flynn dies, and a young boy and his family deal with it only superficially.
• An Encounter – Two schoolboys play truant and are confronted by an elderly man.
• Araby – A boy falls in love with the sister of his friend, but fails in buying her a present from the Araby carnival.
• Eveline – A young woman abandons her plans to leave Ireland with a sailor.
• After the Race – College student Jimmy Doyle tries to fit in with his wealthy friends.
• Two Gallants – Two con men, Lenehan and Corley, trick a maid into stealing from her employer.
• The Boarding House – Mrs. Mooney successfully maneuvers her daughter Polly into an upwardly mobile marriage with Mr. Doran.
• A Little Cloud – Little Chandler's dinner with his old friend Ignatius Gallaher casts a light on his own failed literary dreams. The story reflects also Chandler's mood upon realizing his baby son has replaced him as the center of his wife's affections.
• Counterparts – Farrington, a lumbering alcoholic Irish scrivener, takes out his frustration in pubs and on his son Tom.
• Clay – A maid, Maria, celebrates Halloween with her former foster child and friend Joe Donnelly and his family.
• A Painful Case – Mr. Duffy rebuffs Mrs. Sinico, then four years later realizes he's lost the only chance for love in his life.
• Ivy Day in the Committee Room – Minor Irish politicians fail to live up to the memory of Charles Stewart Parnell.
• A Mother – Mrs. Kearney tries to create a perfect piano recital for her daughter Kathleen but fails miserably because she had no support from others.
• Grace – Mr. Kernan injures himself in a bar fall, and his friends try to get him to go on a Catholic retreat to try to convert him.
• The Dead – At a party, Gabriel Conroy offends three women and realizes in an epiphany, that passionless people like himself are already dead. At 15–16,000 words this story has also been classified a novella. The Dead was adapted to film by John Huston, written for the screen by his son Tony and starring his daughter Angelica as Mrs. Conroy.

Style

Joyce's writing in Dubliners is neutral; he rarely uses hyperbole or emotive language, relying on simplistic language and close detail to create a realistic setting. This ties the reader's understanding of people to their environments. He does not tell the reader what to think, rather we are left to come to our own conclusions; this is evident when contrasted with the moral judgements displayed by earlier writers such as Charles Dickens. This frequently leads to a lack of traditional dramatic resolution within the stories.

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, when Joyce writes, "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.

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 that a reader with a knowledge of the area would be able to directly relate to. The multiple perspectives presented throughout the collection serve to present a broad view of the social and political contexts of life in Dublin at this time.

Further reading

• Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford University Press, 1959, revised edition 1983.
• Burgess, Anthony. Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965); also published as Re Joyce.
• Burgess, Anthony. Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1973)

External links

• Dubliners at Project Gutenberg
• Searchable, self-referential edition of Dubliners, with concordance
• Spark Notes
• Classic Notes