James Joyce Dubliners

James Joyce Dubliners

1. Araby

2. The Dead

3. Grace

4. After The Case

5. A Mother

6. Realistic Setting

   • Rarely uses Hyperbole
   • Understanding people and their environments
     • Doesn't tell people what to think
       • Allows them to come to their own conclusions
         • Lack of traditional dramatic resolution
   • Allows his narrative voice to gravitate towards the voice of a textual character
     • The Dead's opening line
       • The narrative lends itself to a misuse of language typical of the character being described
   • Rarely uses First Person
     • Uses descriptions from the characters' point of view
       • Empirical Perspective
         • An understanding of characters is often given through an analysis of their possessions
       • Detached but highly perceptive narrative voice that displays the lives of the characters in precise detail
     • Only in three stories
       • The Sisters, An Encounter & Araby
         • Narrator never divulges his name and rarely participates in conversation
           • It's possible for a person to observe their own life from the outside
   • Strange and mysterious events occur that remain unexplained
     • Points to details and suggestions, but never completes the puzzle
     • Although these events may not appear profound, the characters' intensely personal & often tragic certainly are
     • Sketch daily situations in which not much seems to happen
   • Routine
   • Characters and events that were alarming similar to real people and places

7. The Sisters

8. An Encounter

9. Progression through Youth to Age culminating in the dead

   • Imagination in youth can mask experiences, but it cannot reverse them or make them disappear

10. Clay

11. All set throughout Dublin

    • Fulfilment and contentedness remain foreign to Dubliners
      • Unfulfilled adventures
      • All people experience frustrated desire for love and new experiences
    • Stories peer into home, hearts and minds of people whose lives connect and intermingle though the shared space and spirit of Dublin
      • A character from one story will mention the name of a character in another story
      • 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
    • A looking-glass with which the Irish could observe and study themselves
    • Ireland during the tumultuous 20th Century
      • Splintered into factions of Protestants and Catholic / Conservatives and Nationalists

12. The link between paralysis or inaction to both death and religion underpins all the stories in Dubliners

    • Characters face events that prevent them from taking action of fulfilling their desires
      • Experience a kind of death in life
        • The Sisters
          • The Death of Father Flynn
          • Inability to talk about death
        • An Encounter
          • Narrator's inability to leave the man
          • Scolding of Leo over the magazine
            • Tensions between Catholics and Protestants

13. Significance of Titles

    • Title Significance in Dulbiners