Joyce worked and played in Dubliners at plotting and characterization, description and dialogue, and (especially) point of view (the technical term for who is telling a story, to whom, and with what limitations).
CONTEXT:
The setting of Dubliners is in and around the city of Dublin, Ireland. It was a kind of third-world nation, really, before the term existed. Though Dublin was a genuinely urban locale, with electric lights and streetcars, competing daily newspapers and even a museum, the city remained fairly unsophisticated at the time when Joyce wrote about it.
In Dubliners, Joyce holds the Roman Catholic Church accountable for the failure of the Irish to advance in step with the rest of Europe. He was particularly bitter about the way in which the Church often recruited intellectuals like himself to serve in the priesthood — rather than encouraging them to use their minds in the service of progress, as doctors, scientists, or engineers.
The Irish Revival, a movement begun in the 1880s to foster understanding and respect for Celtic and Gaelic language and culture, is referred to in Dubliners in "The Dead".
The stories of Dubliners are united by the city itself. The other aspect that unites these disparate works of narrative prose is shared themes. All these stories are united by the ideas that the tales dramatize: paralysis, corruption, and death. Finally, Dubliners begins with a death and ends with a death (in a story titled, logically enough, "The Dead"), with numerous deaths either dramatized or referred to in between.
Dubliners contains fifteen portraits of life in Dublin. Joyce focuses on children and adults who skirt the middle class, such as housemaids, office clerks, music teachers, students, shop girls, swindlers, and out-of-luck businessmen.
In most of the stories, Joyce uses a detached but highly perceptive narrative voice that displays these lives to the reader in precise detail. Rather than present intricate dramas with complex plots, these stories sketch daily situations in which not much seems to happen—a boy visits a bazaar, a woman buys sweets for holiday festivities, a man reunites with an old friend over a few drinks. Though these events may not appear profound, the characters’ intensely personal and often tragic revelations certainly are.
The stories in Dubliners peer into the homes, hearts, and minds of people whose lives connect and intermingle through the shared space and spirit of Dublin. A character from one story will mention the name of a character in another story, and 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 that Joyce would return to again and again in his later works.
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Themes
The Prison of Routine
Restrictive routines and the repetitive, mundane details of everyday life mark the lives of Joyce’s Dubliners and trap them in circles of frustration, restraint, and violence. Routine affects characters who face difficult predicaments, but it also affects characters who have little open conflict in their lives. The young boy of “An Encounter” yearns for a respite from the rather innocent routine of school, only to find himself sitting in a field listening to a man recycle disturbing thoughts.
The most consistent consequences of following mundane routines are loneliness and unrequited love. In “A Painful Case” Mr. Duffy’s obsession with his predictable life costs him a golden chance at love. Eveline, in the story that shares her name, gives up her chance at love by choosing her familiar life over an unknown adventure, even though her familiar routines are tinged with sadness and abuse. The circularity of these Dubliners’ lives effectively traps them, preventing them from being receptive to new experiences and happiness.
The Desire for Escape
The characters in Dubliners may be citizens of the Irish capital, but many of them long for escape and adventure in other countries. Such longings, however, are never actually realized by the stories’ protagonists. The schoolboy yearning for escape and Wild West excitement in “An Encounter” is relegated to the imagination and to the confines of Dublin, while Eveline’s hopes for a new life in Argentina dissolve on the docks of the city’s river. More often than offering a literal escape from a physical place, the stories tell of opportunities to escape from smaller, more personal restraints. Eveline, for example, seeks release from domestic duties through marriage. Mr. Doran wishes to escape marrying Polly in “A Boarding House,” but he knows he must relent. The impulse to escape from unhappy situations defines Joyce’s Dubliners, as does the inability to actually undertake the process.
The Intersection of Life and Death
Dubliners opens with “The Sisters,” which explores death and the process of remembering the dead, and closes with “The Dead,” which invokes the quiet calm of snow that covers both the dead and the living. These stories bookend the collection and emphasize its consistent focus on the meeting point between life and death. Encounters between the newly dead and the living, such as in “The Sisters” and “A Painful Case,” explicitly explore this meeting point, showing what kind of aftershocks a death can have for the living. Mr. Duffy, for example, reevaluates his life after learning about Mrs. Sinico’s death in “A Painful Case,” while the narrator of “The Sisters” doesn’t know what to feel upon the death of the priest. In other stories, including “Eveline,” “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” and “The Dead,” memories of the dead haunt the living and color every action. In “Ivy Day,” for example, Parnell hovers in the political talk.
The dead cast a shadow on the present, drawing attention to the mistakes and failures that people make generation after generation. Such overlap underscores Joyce’s interest in life cycles and their repetition, and also his concern about those “living dead” figures like Maria in “Clay” who move through life with little excitement or emotion except in reaction to everyday snags and delays. The monotony of Dublin life leads Dubliners to live in a suspended state between life and death, in which each person has a pulse but is incapable of profound, life-sustaining action.
Paralysis
In most of the stories in Dubliners, a character has a desire, faces obstacles to it, then ultimately relents and suddenly stops all action. These moments of paralysis show the characters’ inability to change their lives and reverse the routines that hamper their wishes. Such immobility fixes the Dubliners in cycles of experience. Eveline freezes like an animal, fearing the possible new experience of life away from home. These moments evoke the theme of death in life as they show characters in a state of inaction and numbness. The opening story introduces this motif through the character of Father Flynn, whose literal paralysis traps him in a state suspended between life and death. Throughout the collection, this stifling state appears as part of daily life in Dublin, which all Dubliners ultimately acknowledge and accept.
Epiphany
Characters in Dubliners experience both great and small revelations in their everyday lives, moments that Joyce himself referred to as “epiphanies,” a word with connotations of religious revelation. These epiphanies do not bring new experiences and the possibility of reform, as one might expect such moments to. Rather, these epiphanies allow characters to better understand their particular circumstances, usually rife with sadness and routine, which they then return to with resignation and frustration. Sometimes epiphanies occur only on the narrative level, serving as signposts to the reader that a story’s character has missed a moment of self-reflection. For example, in “Clay,” during the Halloween game when Maria touches the clay, which signifies an early death, she thinks nothing of it, overlooking a moment that could have revealed something about herself or the people around her. “Eveline,” “A Painful Case,” and “The Dead” all conclude with epiphanies that the characters fully register, yet these epiphanies are tinged with frustration, sadness, and regret. At the end of “The Dead,” Gabriel’s revelation clarifies the connection between the dead and the living, an epiphany that resonates throughout Dubliners as a whole. The epiphany motif highlights the repeated routine of hope and passive acceptance that marks each of these portraits, as well as the general human condition.
Betrayal
Deception, deceit, and treachery scar nearly every relationship in the stories in Dubliners, demonstrating the unease with which people attempt to connect with each other, both platonically and romantically. In “The Boarding House,” Mrs. Mooney traps Mr. Doran into marrying her daughter Polly, and Mr. Doran dreads the union but will meet his obligation to pursue it. In “The Dead,” Gabriel feels betrayed by his wife’s emotional outpouring for a former lover. This feeling evokes not only the sense of displacement and humiliation that all of these Dubliners fear but also the tendency for people to categorize many acts as “betrayal” in order to shift blame from themselves onto others.
Religion
References to priests, religious belief, and spiritual experience appear throughout the stories in Dubliners and ultimately paint an unflattering portrait of religion. In the first story, “The Sisters,” Father Flynn cannot keep a strong grip on the chalice and goes mad in a confessional box. This story marks religion’s first appearance as a haunting but incompetent and dangerous component of Dublin life. The strange man of “An Encounter” wears the same clothing as Father Flynn, connecting his lascivious behavior, however remotely, to the Catholic Church. The presence of so many religious references also suggests that religion traps Dubliners into thinking about their lives after death.
Symbols
Windows
Windows in Dubliners consistently evoke the anticipation of events or encounters that are about to happen. For example, the narrator in “The Sisters” looks into a window each night, waiting for signs of Father Flynn’s death. The suspense for these young boys centers in that space separating the interior life from the exterior life. Windows also mark the threshold between domestic space and the outside world, and through them the characters in Dubliners observe their own lives as well as the lives of others. Both Eveline and Gabriel turn to windows when they reflect on their own situations, both of which center on the relationship between the individual and the individual’s place in a larger context.
Dusk and Nighttime
Joyce’s Dublin is perpetually dark. No streams of sunlight or cheery landscapes illuminate these stories. Instead, a spectrum of grey and black underscores their somber tone. Characters walk through Dublin at dusk, an in-between time that hovers between the activity of day and the stillness of night, and live their most profound moments in the darkness of late hours. These dark backdrops evoke the half-life or in-between state the characters in Dubliners occupy, both physically and emotionally, suggesting the intermingling of life and d eath that marks every story. In this state, life can exist and proceed, but the darkness renders Dubliners’ experiences dire and doomed.
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