Essays on Dubliners

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...

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...

‘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....

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...

James Joyce’s “After the Race” and “Two Gallants” of his collection The Dubliners have two very diverging plotlines that both exhibit various literary elements. “After the Race” is tells the story of Jimmy Doyle’s venture seeking riches and high reputation, unable to see past his...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Critic Bradbury states that “With light taxation, no inflation, cheap food, cheap labour, a plentiful supply of domestic servants, many ordinary middle class families with modest incomes lived full and comfortable lives. No wonder that so many who came from such families and survived the...

‘[T]he modern period […] begins really with the late nineteenth [century], when the sense of the passing of a major phase of English history was already in the air.’ Indeed, when we discuss ‘modern’ in terms of literature this tends to be a reference to...

What happens to a dream deferred? According to James Joyce, perhaps nothing. Illustrated in his short story Eveline, this Dublin-born author both poses and responds to the age old-question of comfort versus risk. In a time of upheaval throughout the continent, Eveline serves as an...

Eveline as Ireland: a realistic and symbolic approach James Joyce has always been widely regarded as a major exponent of ‘the children of a fragmented, pluralistic, sick, weird period’ as Nietzsche called the artists of the time (Bradbury, p. 7). His career as an artist...

Probably no other twentieth century short story has called forth more attention than Joyce’s “Araby.” Some universality of experience makes the story interesting to readers of all ages, for they respond instinctively to an experience that could have been their own. The story suggests the...

It is Joyce’s use of voyeurism that most characterizes the erotic in “The Dead,” “The Boarding House,” “Two Gallants,” and “Araby.” Eroticism is strongly driven by mystery and suspense. By creating a passive individual experiencing sexuality without actual contact, Joyce can use every aspect of...

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...

Darkness and light are everywhere, and one cannot exist without the other. However, a combination of the two creates shadows in which a world can be altered into a form of dusk, twilight. It is in this shadowy light that a person may find themselves...

In Anne McLintock’s Imperial Leather, she claims that women are the earth that is to be discovered, entered, named, and above all, owned. In the work of James Joyce, particularly Ulysses and Dubliners, he explores women who fit into McLintock’s description: women as commodities. It...

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...

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...