Essays on Dubliners

Joyce’s depiction of women is characterized by a high degree of literary self-consciousness, perhaps even more so than in the rest of his work. The self-consciousness emerges as an awareness of both genre and linguistic expectations. contrasting highly self-conscious, isolated literary men (or men with...

James Joyce paints a grim picture of the sheltered life of 19th century women in Dublin, in his story Eveline. Part of a series, called Dubliners, Eveline is the account of a young woman torn between sentimental duty and the opportunity for escape. Eveline chooses...

James Joyce is lauded for his distinct style of writing in free direct discourse. Though his style may seem chaotic and disjointed, Joyce adds a single fixture to his narratives that conveys a unity and connects the otherwise haphazard dialogue. In The Dead, the final...

James Joyce’s Dubliners is a fearlessly candid portrayal of his native city, providing his readers a glimpse of a “dear dirty Dublin”, and to his countrymen “one good look at themselves”. Joyce’s collection of stories, virtually chronicling the stages of maturation within a human life,...

The characters whom inhabit Joyce’s world in “Dubliners,” often have, as Harvard Literature Professor Fischer stated in lecture, a “limited way” of thinking about and understanding themselves and the world around them. Such “determinism,” however, operates not on a broad cultural scale, but works in...

Dubliners was published in 1914 and written by James Joyce, who was born in 1882. When applying feminist theory to the Dubliners short stories, one must keep in mind that although feminism had its start in the 19th century, many of the formative feminist essays...

Like character actors or members of an ensemble drama, women are omnipresent in Joyce’s literary corpus. In Dubliners, for example, women are painted and developed within a variety of character framings. The reader is exposed to woman as sister (such as the sisters Moran in...

In the short story, The Dead from the novel Dubliners by James Joyce, readers are led through a bustling, yet monotonous, dinner party by the protagonist Gabriel Conroy, an intelligent, impersonal, “cold-air” introvert who is constantly found present in his own thoughts, rather than mentally...

In James Joyce’s “Araby”, an arcane glimpse into the life of a young boy is revealed as he passes from a state of naivete into cognizance of his life. We watch as he leads himself through a fateful-ending journey in which he realizes his disillusionment...

Much of Dubliners revolves around the weary contemplation of mortality, the apex of which appears in the novel’s endpiece, “The Dead,” which serves as the perfect counterpart to “The Sisters,” bookending the collection of stories with a cyclic emphasis on the intersection between life and...

“The Dead” by James Joyce, from Dubliners, centers around the events that take place at an annual Christmas party in Dublin, Ireland. This short story follows the protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, who is thrust into these events, and is the only character that expresses his discontent...

James Joyce wrote two versions of his short story “The Sisters,” the first one under the pen name of Stephen Daedalus. Both versions tell the story of a boy and a priest, Father Flynn. The latter dies, and the people around him react to the...

Duality and Paralysis in “Two Gallants” James Joyce’s “Two Gallants”, from Dubliners, is at first glance the tale of two men driven by greed to manipulate a slavey. Lenehan and Corley enjoy their mischievous banter as they stroll through Dublin, all the while plotting to...

In the Irish Catholic Society portrayed by James Joyce in Dubliners, the characters live in a world guided by “respectability”, yet some are driven by the urge to escape. Joyce illustrates the reputable populace as false and undesirable, and depicts his protagonists as the few...

In the short story “The Dead,” James Joyce displays his character Gabriel as pretentious and misogynistic through emphasizing his wealth, education, and presumed superiority to the women in his society. Gabriel, who requires constant reassurance from women to feel validated, uses his intellect and money...

According to Friedrich Nietzsche, “‘free spirits’…do not exist, did not exist” but “could one day exist” (18). Mr. James Duffy, the protagonist of James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” in Dubliners, has characteristics similar to that of Nietzsche’s theoretical overman. Nevertheless, although Duffy appears to live...

The theme of childhood is typically presented as one of happiness and youthful freedom. James Joyce takes a different approach, however, as he exposes the vulnerability that naturally comes with childhood but is often not expressed in literature. He does this through his use of...

The choices manufactured on a day-to-day basis effect every choice and action in the future. Unfortunately, these choices can be based off different constrictions and outside forces. Throughout the years ones gender could play a extensive part in stagnation and the lack of ability for...

Despite the often automatic preconception in literature that darkness and negativity are inextricably linked, darkness is first a protective and natural force of childhood on North Richmond Street. The narrator first mentions darkness when describing the sunset, naming the children’s time of play as beginning...

The thirteenth of fifteen stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners collection, “A Mother,” can be seen as something of a break between the heavy, serious vignettes in its vicinity. It can be seen as a story to chuckle at; after all, the title character is an...

In James Joyce’s short story “Clay,” fate forces Maria into a nun-like existence and keeps her from realizing her dream of marriage. She seems content with her position on the exterior, but several clues suggest this is not the case. Joyce makes this clear as...

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word, paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me...

In James Joyce’s “Araby”, readers are taken on a young boy’s quest of discovery. The beginning of the short story paints a picture of Dublin, a place described as rather dark and lonely. This is a ‘coming of age’ tale, peering into the mind of...

‘How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it…’ Virginia Woolf’s The Mark on the Wall suggests a number of ways of considering the mundane in literature....

A deconstructionist has many duties, and among them are deriving multiple meanings from a source as well as a destruction of previous criticisms of said source. This essay on deconstruction will take another look at James Joyce’s short story “Araby,” one of fifteen stories from...

In “The Sisters” James Joyce creates an elusive mystery surrounding the death of James Flynn by withholding narrator insight into the events of the story. He achieves this by selecting a young boy as the narrator, whose age is not specified but is hinted at...

Even though money can’t buy happiness, the lack of money is usually the cause of sadness. Poverty is, in fact, a widespread problem that can sometimes restrict and even imprison a person to the point that struggling seems pointless. In Dubliners by James Joyce, the...

Just one of the many short stories compiled in James Joyce’s Dubliners, “After the Race” is an effective portrayal of the shame and misfortune that result from Jimmy Doyle’s efforts to become accepted by a wealthy group of men. His constant desire to present himself...

In literature authors often attempt to create meaning by causing characters to undergo some form of moral reconciliation or spiritual reassessment. In the case of Dubliners, James Joyce has created a series of stories that center on one central epiphany, that of paralysis within a...

James Joyce’s A Mother is a short story based around the life of Mrs. Kearney, a strong-willed woman whose breach of convention results in the destruction of her acclaimed reputation. Joyce’s linguistic use of naturalism, modernism, and feminism, exemplifies the “paralysis”[1] of Dublin’s rigid societal...