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| image: james joyce |
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"I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city."--James Joyce
"My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country, and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the center of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard."--James Joyce
As Joyce implies in the previous quotations, Dubliners is a meticulously ordered series of short stories. The book is divided into four sections, each of which represents a stage in the course of a normal life. The first section of the book, which deals with childhood, includes "The Sisters," "An Encounter," and "Araby;" the second section, which deals with adolescence, includes "Eveline," "After the Race," "Two Gallants," and "The Boarding House;" the third section, which deals with maturity, includes "A Little Cloud," "Counterparts," "Clay," and "A Painful Case;" the final section of the book, which deals with public life, includes "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," "A Mother," "Grace," and "The Dead."
Although the stories are divided into different sections, they are nonetheless united by two major elements: paralysis and epiphany. In the first case, Joyce considered Dublin to be a symbol of Ireland's moral and political failure. Growing up as a follower of the political ideologies of Charles Parnell, an Anglo-Irish Protestant who led the battle for Home Rule in Ireland, Joyce was frustrated by English Imperialism and the role of the Catholic Church in maintaining English sovereignty. At the age of 20, Joyce left Ireland, renounced Catholicism, and, as the introduction to an edition of the book relates, began writing a series of stories which portrayed the citizens of Dublin as "drunks, child batterers, boasters, gossips, and schemers" (ix). In short, Joyce had little faith in the citizens of Dublin, and his portrayal of them as drunks, etc., are embodiments of his larger contention that Dublin was the center of physical, moral, cultural, and political paralysis.
In addition to the theme of paralysis, the stories of Dubliners are also connected on a more "literary" level. Each of the stories in Dubliners, in one form or another, contains an epiphany, or moment of insight. Joyce later described this method in an early draft of another text: "This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant 'a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.'" In other words, Joyce's definition of "epiphany" differs from its commonly understood religious usage, and it's clear that Joyce was more interested in the significance of "trivial" moments than in the grand spiritual epiphanies associated with religion.
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