Dubliners

In Dubliners Joyce focuses on the restraints that everyday realities impose on important aspects of life, such as relationships. Unremarkable objects thus gain remarkable importance in the characters’ lives as symbols of such imposition, and in doing so they illustrate the detrimental impact of the mundane and the routine. In “A Painful Case,” for example, Joyce walks the reader through Mr. Duffy’s sparsely decorated home. Everyday objects are crucial here because so few of them are present, and the ones that Joyce notes reflect Mr. Duffy’s values. Almost everything, such as his furniture and his linens, is black or white, and extremely organized. Mr. Duffy’s relationships share similar qualities. He cannot endure the grey, in-between state of his interactions with Mrs. Sinico, nor can he tolerate the messiness of intimacy. In Mr. Duffy’s case, objects serve as a microcosm of his person and as a commentary on the loneliness that a preoccupation with detail can harbor. His concern with rectitude may ensure the straightened appearance of his home, but it undermines the possibility of love.

Typical objects also bolster the palpable realism of the stories in the collection. When Joyce describes a character sipping a drink or munching on food, as he does with Lenehan in “Two Gallants,” the character becomes real and accessible because of the specific meal he eats and is no longer a distant, abstract figure on the page. Lenehan eats not just dinner, but a dinner of peas and ginger beer. While many of the objects might be unfamiliar to modern or non-Irish readers, they nevertheless create an authenticity that encourages the reader to observe characters closely. Joyce makes the reader privy to all aspects of his characters’ lives: both the uneventful necessities and the lofty thoughts, and the connection between the two.

With the first-person narration of “The Sisters,” Joyce immediately pulls the reader into the collection. The intimate storytelling of this and the following two stories creates a sense of shared experience: the narrator speaks to the reader as a fellow Dubliner. The transition to the third person in “Eveline” does not necessarily create a detached feeling, but with the rest of the collection the reader becomes a voyeur, watching the ebb and flow of Dublin life as Joyce does. At the same time, Joyce manages to include the same sort of intimacy of the first-person narration in the third-person narration. When he describes a scene, he allows the prose to mimic the thoughts of the protagonist. Being a Dubliner, Joyce suggests, is feeling like both a part of a community as well as an outsider to it. In turn, the narrative arc of the collection, starting with “The Sisters” and ending with “The Dead,” invites the reader into Dublin as someone who feels the snow connecting his or her life to others, like Gabriel does, for example, but in remote and cold ways.

The two forms of narration in Dubliners also mark a division between stories with young protagonists and stories with adult protagonists. Having the children narrate in first-person, however, produces articulate and eloquent stories, not simplistic, childish action. Other than the fact that these narrators use “I,” the language of the earlier stories is almost the same as that of the later stories. Such similarity hints at an equalizing of childhood and adulthood—a person is a Dubliner at all ages. But it also suggests that in adulthood, people lose the affirmative power of directing their own stories. The hope and desire of the Dubliner youth fits with a self-aware “I,” whereas the often downtrodden, resigned adults of the later stories, worn out from the hardships of Dublin life, struggle to find their individual voices.