Dubliners

By James Joyce and Laurence Davies

Introduction and Notes by Laurence Davies, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.

Living overseas but writing, always, about his native city, Joyce made Dublin unforgettable. The stories in Dubliners show us truants, seducers, gossips, rally-drivers, generous hostesses, corrupt politicians, failing priests, amateur theologians, struggling musicians, moony adolescents, victims of domestic brutishness, sentimental aunts and poets, patriots earnest or cynical, and people striving to get by.

In every sense an international figure, Joyce was faithful to his own country by seeing it unflinchingly and challenging every precedent and piety in Irish literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Nov 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781848704466

Book preview

Trayler

Contents

Introduction

Dubliners

The Sisters

An Encounter

Araby

Eveline

After the Race

Two Gallants

The Boarding House

A Little Cloud

Counterparts

Clay

A Painful Case

Ivy Day in the Committee Room

A Mother

Grace

The Dead

Notes to Dubliners

General Introduction

Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

General Adviser

Keith Carabine

Rutherford College

University of Kent at Canterbury

Introduction

i

James Joyce’s Dubliners is a work both intensely local and broadly cosmopolitan. It lies open to reading as a collection of stories challenging every theme and every convention of earlier Irish literature and as a book rooted in the continental fiction of Joyce’s day but branching and blossoming into the world of colonial and post-colonial literature.

With the abolition of its parliament in 1800 and the Act of Union the following year, Ireland ceased to be a separate but subjugated kingdom whose monarch was the king or queen of Britain. From 1801 to 1921, all thirty-two of its counties were linked with the islands to its east in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Although in theory an equal partner whose hundred representatives sat in the Parliament at Westminster, Ireland in the nineteenth century was still governed as a dependency whose economy and culture were subordinate to British, and especially English, interests. Dublin, the country’s largest and most cosmopolitan city, had been for centuries the legal, financial and administrative capital, the brain, if that is the proper word, of the colonial system, the place where the vortices of power and change converged. For Joyce, as for many of his compatriots, altogether too much power remained in the wrong hands and all too little change was visible.

James Augustine Joyce was born in Rathgar, one of Dublin’s southern suburbs, in 1882. The eldest surviving child, he would eventually have three brothers and six sisters. May Joyce (née Murray), their mother, was musical and had studied piano and voice with her aunts, who would provide the models for the Misses Morkan in ‘The Dead’. John Joyce, their father, had an undemanding appointment as a collector of local property taxes (lost in 1892 thanks to a municipal reorganisation), considerable skill in Dublin politics, a financially demanding practice of mortgaging the few small properties he had inherited from his family in Cork and an equally demanding taste for whiskey. His son James received a stringently academic education at Clongowes Wood and Belvedere Colleges, schools run by Jesuits, who had their pupils write at the head of every page of every exercise Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam – ‘to the greater glory of God’. From 1898 to 1902 he studied Latin, French and Italian at University College, Dublin, another institution guided by the Society of Jesus. Joyce was only eighteen and in the middle of his undergraduate career when the London Fortnightly Review published his essay on Henrik Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, praising this recent play for its fresh and uncompromising atmosphere with an enthusiasm that gladdened the playwright himself. Joyce recognised in the Norwegian author (whose country was yoked unhappily to Sweden even as Ireland was to Britain) what he would establish for himself in Dubliners: ‘Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play a part in a great drama.’ *

[* Footnote: Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (eds), The Critical Writings of James Joyce, Viking, New York 1959, p. 45. Henceforth, references appear parenthetically in the text; for full citations, see Works Cited at the end of this Introduction.]

After a brief period of toying with life as a medical student in Paris, where J. M. Synge reported him as ‘rather unbrushed and rather indolent’ (Ellmann, p. 125 n.), Joyce returned to Dublin. Like Gabriel Conroy in ‘The Dead’, he made a little money writing reviews for the Dublin Daily Express, an aggressively Unionist paper (dedicated, in other words, to preserving the union of Ireland and Britain) whose politics he did not share. At this time, he was also writing poems and essays. In February 1904, he began work on his autobiographical novel Stephen Hero, the precursor of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, finally published in 1916. In July, he wrote ‘The Sisters’, the story that, after heavy revision, would set the tone for Dubliners. He had seized the opportunity to earn a pound from The Irish Homestead, a magazine published in the cause of agricultural improvement but open to literary work. Joyce used to call it ‘The Pig’s Paper’. Although a devotee of fairy stories and mystical beliefs, the editor, George Russell (known as ‘Æ’), was hospitable to Irish realist fiction, including the often sombre short stories of George Moore; these stories, collected as The Untilled Field (1903), had done for the countryside what Joyce was about to do for Dublin.

What Joyce would do for the city, however, would be done at a remove. His evocations of its life in A Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were all created overseas, as were nearly all the stories in Dubliners. The reasons for this self-imposed but intensely observant detachment might be described as impatience with the status quo in Ireland and a patient dedication to the artistic possibilities of exile.

Although given to describing his art, as we shall see, in religious terms, and although driven by a vocation as demanding as a priest’s, Joyce had developed a fierce dislike of the moral, cultural and political influence of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1904, he told Nora Barnacle, his lover, soon to be his companion:

I found it impossible for me to remain in it on account of the impulses of my nature. I made secret war upon it when I was a student and declined to accept the positions it offered me. By doing this I made myself a beggar but I retained my pride. Now I make open war upon it by what I write and say and do. [Letters, 2, p. 48]

During the second half of the nineteenth century, in the aftermath of the terrible period of famine and disease known as the Great Hunger (1845–7), the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland underwent a devotional revolution. Its leaders swept away supposedly pagan practices such as keening at funerals, built splendid new churches even in the remotest areas, insisted on regular attendance at prayers as well as mass itselfand imposed a strict interpretation of the church’s moral teachings, especially, as it seemed to Joyce, those concerned with sexual behaviour, the ‘impulses of my nature’.

His hostility extended to the church’s censure of other people’s natures. Although usually ready to support Nationalist aspirations, as long as they were not expressed in too violent a form, the Catholic Church had been true to its principles in assisting the political destruction of one of Ireland’s greatest leaders, Charles Stewart Parnell. Parnell, chief of the Irish Parliamentary Party, was a masterly tactician in the House of Commons and a masterly strategist at home. In Joyce’s words: ‘Nothing more unusual can be imagined than the appearance of this intellectual phenomenon in the midst of the moral suffocation of Westminster’ (Critical Writings, p. 226). When, in 1890, Parnell was named as the lover of Mrs Katharine (‘Kitty’) O’Shea, the suffocation grew more stifling yet. A year later, Parnell died, stripped of his leadership and abandoned on moral grounds by his allies among the British Liberals and a host of former supporters in his own party who chose doctrinal over political loyalty. According to Joyce:

In his final desperate appeal to his countrymen, he begged them not to throw him as a sop to the English wolves howling around them. It redounds to their honour that they did not fail this appeal. They did not throw him to the English wolves; they tore him to pieces themselves. [Critical Writings, p. 228]

The resulting atmosphere of pettiness, recrimination, bickering, venality, lethargy and censoriousness permeates ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, the most explicitly political story in Dubliners, as it does the contentious Christmas lunch scene in A Portrait of the Artist.

One reading of Irish culture, starting from W. B. Yeats’s Autobiographies (1926), sees the lively interest in traditional Gaelic culture and the Irish language, which features in ‘A Mother’ and ‘The Dead’, as a reaction to the depressed hopes of constitutional and revolutionary politics after the fall of Parnell and a disabling leadership struggle among the Fenian exponents of physical force. The enthusiasm, in fact, had flared up some years earlier: for instance the Gaelic Athletic Association, which promoted traditional sports such as shinty and hurling over ‘alien’ games such as rugby and cricket, dated back to 1884. Nor was political activity in the 1890s and early 1900s entirely futile or unfocused. Nevertheless, in this period, the Gaelic revival was at its height. Encouraged by the Gaelic League, founded in 1893, young men and women worked to resuscitate the Irish language which had suffered a precipitous decline in the nineteenth century thanks to the pressures of famine, emigration and the general attraction of English as a language associated with imperial power, modernity, global circulation and commercial success. By 1908, the league had five hundred and ninety-five branches across the country. Meanwhile, writers such as Yeats, Augusta Gregory and J. M. Synge were nurturing themselves on the rich food of the ancient Irish sagas, Catholics attended churches built to look like the old, lost monasteries, some fearless men adopted the kilt (earning themselves the nickname ‘Down with Trousers’), and women like Miss Ivors (of ‘The Dead’) wore Celtic jewellery and took their holidays in the traditionalist west.

Joyce’s attitude to the revival was ambiguous. Irish words and phrases show up in all his works (but especially in Finnegans Wake) like pebbles working through the linguistic soil. His affinities were nationalist, socialist and perhaps anarchist (a combination as unlike Nazi ‘National Socialism’ as could be imagined), and he considered Anglo-Saxondom to be ‘almost entirely a materialistic civilisation’; yet, in the lecture in which those words appear, given at the Popular University of Trieste in 1907, he excoriates the futility of cultural without political renewal:

Ancient Ireland is dead just as ancient Egypt is dead.

. . . It is well past time for Ireland to have done once and for all with failure. If she is truly capable of reviving, let her awake, or let her cover up her head and lie down decently in her grave for ever.

[Critical Writings, pp. 173–4]

To accomplish this renewal, it would be necessary, however critically, to embrace the modern world, forswear ‘compromise . . . equivocations and misunderstandings’ (Critical Writings, p. 174), and think in international as well as national terms. In his art and in his politics, Joyce became a cosmopolitan nationalist, unwilling to submit to any authority, whether of empire, tradition, party discipline or the church.

In October 1904, Joyce set off for the Continent with Nora Barnacle, the woman from County Galway, in the west, who would be his companion, the mother of their children, and a constant reminder of Ireland in its less repressive, more exuberant forms. His last, urgent request to a friend before leaving was for a toothbrush, a nail brush, a coat, a vest and a pair of black boots: ‘I have absolutely no boots’ (Ellmann, p. 179). In Pola and Trieste, both Italian-speaking enclaves of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Joyce would have the chance to see Ireland at a clarifying distance, to scrutinise without being dictated to or scrutinised in return.

ii

Joyce wrote most of the stories in Dubliners in 1905, while living in Trieste. Two others, ‘The Sisters’ and ‘A Painful Case’, were revisions of earlier work. The manuscript went off to the London publisher Grant Richards, who soon agreed to offer a contract. When Joyce added two more stories, ‘Two Gallants’ and ‘A Little Cloud’, early in 1906, however, the atmosphere of sleazy sexuality and deceit in the former caused Richards to back away. At this point, the collection began with ‘The Sisters’ and ended with ‘Grace’. The addition of ‘The Dead’ in September 1907 completely redirected the collection’s arc, which now ended with Gabriel Conroy’s lyrical vision of Ireland, the snow, the living and the dead, rather than with a story that begins with a drunk falling down the steps to a pub lavatory and finishes with a meretricious and unctuously pally sermon delivered by Father Purdon, a priest whom Joyce named in honour of a street of Dublin brothels.

Authors’ explanations of their own work require as much sceptical open-mindedness as the commentaries of professional critics. Joyce’s claim, for instance, that the stories belong in four groups – childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life (Ellmann, p. 208) – needs a good deal of chopping and stretching to fit the pattern. On the other hand, thinking of ‘Grace’, or of the bleak inventory of Mr Duffy’s uncarpeted room in ‘A Painful Case’, or of Polly’s swiftly drying tears and readjusted hairpin on the final page of ‘The Boarding House’, it is not too difficult to suspect what Joyce meant by describing Dubliners to Grant Richards as written ‘for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness’ (Letters, 2, p. 134). The texts offer details with a kind of cool generosity but are sparing with the judgements.

The girl brought him a plate of grocer’s hot peas, seasoned with pepper and vinegar, a fork and his ginger beer. He ate his food greedily and found it so good that he made a note of the shop mentally. [‘Two Gallants’, p. 39]

Few readers would admire Lenehan, the subject of this passage, who is surely not a gallant in the accepted sense, but this is no scene of gastronomic debauchery. He is chronically hard up, and this evening dish of peas is his first meal since breakfast. The pepper and the vinegar will make the dish more palatable; the fork appears almost as an unexpected extra. In such circumstances, to read the adverb ‘greedily’ as a condemnation rather than an observation might itself be a moral indulgence. Lenehan at this moment deserves neither scorn nor pity but acknowledgement. This is how he lives.

This ‘scrupulous meanness’ does not occur only in connection with characters who might be said to live meanly or be mean-spirited. Here is Maria leaving the Dublin by Lamplight laundry:

When she got outside the streets were shining with rain and she was glad of her old brown waterproof. The tram was full and she had to sit on the little stool at the end of the car, facing all the people, with her toes barely touching the floor. She arranged in her mind all she was going to do and thought how much better it was to be independent and have your own money in your pocket. [‘Clay’, pp. 72–3]

Again we have the ordinary details, again we see them from a tightly focused point of view (or eavesdrop on an inner voice) that is and must be conscious of life’s exigencies. Those who have managed to see in Joyce’s frequent references to raingear symbols of disconnectedness can never have imagined Dublin weather.

What Declan Kiberd wonderfully calls the ‘famished banality’ of Joyce’s prose (Inventing Ireland, p. 331) applies to the sympathetic and the loathsome alike and to all those scenes and figures in between who have evoked such a variety of responses. Is Miss Ivors, who makes a brief but incisive appearance in ‘The Dead’, an irritating busybody, a naïve cultural romantic, a person who tempers her convictions with good humour or a true patriot? How, in ‘A Mother’, can Mrs Kearney’s insistence that her daughter get the proper fee for her patriotic performance be reconciled with the financial shortcomings of the patriotic organisers and their amen chorus from the press? Even when the references are more lofty, as when the narrator of ‘Araby’ describes himself as having borne his ‘chalice safely through a throng of foes’ – like a knight of the Round Table or a missionary priest – the hostile territory is loud not with the cries of rival knights or nonplussed pagans but ‘the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers who sang a come-all-you about O’Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land’ (p. 18). In this triangulation of religious or romantic emotion, political sentiment and the cheapest cuts of pickled pork, modes of existence mingle inextricably.

This juxtaposition of high and low owes something to Gustave Flaubert who, in Madame Bovary (1857), cross-cuts between a love scene and a competition for prize cattle. Indeed, it is easier to connect Joyce with writers in the Americas and continental Europe than with writers in Ireland. His eye for the betraying detail, his reluctance to moralise, his fascination with sexual misbehaviour, his willingness to shock the pious, his awareness that the colour of local colour is not always pink or cerulean blue all link him with such authors as Kate Chopin and Hamlin Garland in the United States, Ibsen in Norway, Hauptmann in Germany, the Goncourt brothers in France, George Douglas Brown in Scotland, Caradoc Evans in Wales. His only predecessor in Irish literature was George Moore, himself an author steeped in the fiction of Flaubert and his descendants.

The notion that the heart of the nation is rural and that thus Dublin is at best an irrelevance or at worst a port of entry for alien ideas has had a long history – and had its origins in that foreignness having been partially the case. Indeed, the anti-metropolitan bias would characterise the official culture of the Free State and the Republic into the 1950s and beyond. The observers of Irish city life like Joyce and O’Casey moved overseas and damned the censorship. At the beginning of the twentieth century, despite the large proportion of Irish writers who actually lived there, the sidelining of Dublin was almost a literary given. It was part of Joyce’s contribution to his country’s culture that he sought to redress the balance. Dubliners concludes with a vision of Ireland as a whole in which Gabriel, bedded down for the night in a Dublin hotel, lets his mind drift westward across ‘the dark mutinous Shannon waves’ (p. 160). Even in 1905, two years before writing ‘The Dead’, Joyce had proposed to complement his urban collection with one called Provincials (Ellmann, pp. 207–8).

A list of the ways in which Joyce departed from Irish literary precedent could start, then, with the concentration on Dublin. Joyce’s scrutiny is so minute that a reader might well imagine every side of the city’s existence had been covered, but that would not be the case. Generally, he gives us the lives of middle- and lower-middle-class people – clerks, salesmen, journalists, boarding-house keepers, political hacks and jobbing musicians – rather than the lives either of the powerful in church, state, business and the professions or of the virtually powerless in the slums. Joyce attends to the arithmetic of subsistence with a care that rivals Balzac and might have pleased an Engels or a Marx, and often his characters teeter on the edge of financial disaster, but their genteel or bohemian poverty is nothing like the poverty of the slums, then the most disease-ridden, congested and generally wretched in the entire United Kingdom, with a mortality rate higher than Calcutta’s (Kiberd, pp. 192, 219). This tightness of focus need not be grounds for reproach; short fiction concentrates and filters, and Joyce was not writing a panoramic novel, let alone a treatise. He dealt, moreover, with what he knew best, a social world, provincial and colonial, whose inhabitants, having neither the wherewithal nor the recklessness to satisfy desire, yearn too little or too much.

Some yearn for other times, some for other places, some for money, some for love and others for oblivion. Maria (‘Clay’) hankers for the days before a family quarrel; Gabriel (‘The Dead’) knows all too well that he can most easily charm the guests at the party by evoking the Dublin hospitality of half a century before; drinking his way from one Dublin bar to another, Little Chandler (‘A Little Cloud’) fancies himself a literary swell in London; Eveline wants to escape her brutal and mean-spirited father; the boy in ‘Araby’ is desperate to visit an exotically named charity bazaar and win the heart of Mangan’s sister; Farrington (‘Counterparts’) wants the price of a drink, and then some more. James Duffy (‘A Painful Case’) cannot bring himself to yearn for anything at all and, as a character in Dubliners, perhaps he has the right idea. The greater the longing, the greater the chance for disillusionment: Maria’s brothers will never speak to each other again; although the narrative never mentions this (but as Joyce, who had an adamantine memory, and any other Irish reader would recall), the old, warm-hearted Dublin of Gabriel’s speech was the impotent capital of a disease and famine-stricken country; Chandler’s friend Gallagher, who brags about metropolitan life and patronises ‘dear dirty Dublin’ (p. 52), has ‘something vulgar’ in his manner, ‘perhaps . . . the result of living in London amid the bustle and competition of the Press’ (p. 53); Eveline cannot bear to board the ferry to England, let alone the ship to Argentina; the Araby bazaar is closing, and the remaining hucksters talk banalities in English accents (p. 21); at the end of his sodden evening, Farrington ‘did not even feel drunk; and he had only twopence in his pocket’ (p. 68).

Returning to his darkened house, Farrington discovers that his wife has gone to evening prayers. Without her to tyrannise, he turns on his young son. In a futile attempt to buy him off, all the poor boy can do is offer to pray on his father’s behalf: ‘I’ll say a Hail Mary for you, pa, if you don’t beat me . . . I’ll say a Hail Mary . . . ’ (p. 69). Farrington needs every prayer imaginable, but this is not the kind of story where a few words of intercession can turn a sodden brute into a penitent. In its religious sense, scandal is the result of a deplorable action rather than the action itself: anything scandalous might embarrass or discredit the church. When Aunt Kate complains about the recent edict from the Vatican forbidding women to sing at mass, Mary Jane ‘pacifically’ reminds her that she’s ‘giving scandal to Mr Browne who is of the other persuasion’ (p. 140). In other words, a Catholic should say nothing that might be noted by a Protestant and used as evidence against the faith. In the same sense, there are political and cultural kinds of scandal: a good Irish Nationalist should do or say nothing that an Englishman, especially a Unionist, might seize upon, and a loyal Irish writer should write nothing of that sort. These anxieties and restraints are by no means unique to Ireland; they occur whenever one group feels the hostile gaze of another, usually more powerful, one. Ireland’s cultural history does offer some celebrated examples of outraged citizens attempting to corral authors: for example, the audiences at

Reviews for Dubliners

[larryking1-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Sure, this collection was written by none other than James Joyce, but let's be perfectly honest: this book encapsulates what Thoreu was talking about when he stated the obvious: "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." After finishing this collection of failed lives, broken dreams, religious superstition, alcoholic excess, harsh memories, heartbreak, double-dealing, etc, I am going to need lots of ice cream to cleanse my palate of from the taste of a 'why even bother' mentality. And to think that my Irish grandmother was living in these very streets as this book was written! No wonder she left! Despair at its most relentless; as one character notes, "I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." And he was one of the lucky ones!

[currerbell-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A reread of Dubliners, which I haven't read in half a century. A first read of the Norton Critical Edition with its supplementary materials. Dubliners could get 5***** on its own, but the supplementary materials in this NCE are absolutely superb, even better than the usually excellent NCE material. Especially good were Howard Ehrlich's " 'Araby' in Context: The 'Splendid Bazaar,' Irish Orientalism, and James Clarence Mangan" and Victor Cheng's "Empire and Patriarchy in 'The Dead'."

[szarka_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Worth buying for "The Dead" alone.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Verzameling korte verhalen, nogal wisselend van niveau, geen meesterwerken maar wel gedegen vakmanschap. Gemeenschappelijk katholieke verwijzingen, band met Dublin. Telkens een schokkende gebeurtenis voor de betrokken persoon. Apart: langere essay The Dead, subliem-wervelend.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Quite apart from the perfection of “The Dead,” death permeates the stories, vignettes, character sketches and emotional revues of Dubliners. A death is announced in the first sentence of the first story, “Sisters.” Whether in the foreground or mentioned in passing, deaths are just part of life for those who live in Dublin. When death gets title billing in that final story, it is hardly surprisingly to find Joyce reaching some kind of summative view on the matter with the snow now general across all of Ireland.This time reading Dubliners, I was struck by the “The Sisters,” “An Encounter,” and, as ever, “Araby.” But also “The Boarding House,” and “A Mother.” Yet standing apart from all of them is “The Dead.” It is so much more complete, so much more complex, so much more human and humane, and sadder. It truly is the culmination.Highly recommended, every time you read it.

[laytonwoman3rd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I began reading my lovely new Folio edition right out of the wrapper, and at first I couldn't quite see what the point of it all was. The first few stories, despite the clear brilliance of the writing---characters fully drawn in a couple sentences, images so sharp the smells of theriverthepubthesickroom come off the page--seemed to be all middle. The end of a story felt like the end of a chapter and I looked to pick up the scrap of thread that surely must be found in the pages to follow, but it never appeared. As so often happens with collections of short fiction, I connected with some of the pieces and not so much (or not at all) with others. I skipped one entirely after two paragraphs (that almost always happens too). But, and this will be no surprise to anyone who has read ANYTHING by Joyce (because it will have been "The Dead", 9 times out of 10), the final selection, "The Dead" just dropped me on my keister. It's perfectly made; the words are all Right-- there's never a lightning bolt when a lightning bug is what's wanted. It begins, it proceeds, it ends--in fact it ends with a paragraph so exquisite that, had I a drop of Irish blood in me, I would have been wailing. As it was, a tear was enough. My beloved cadre of 30-something current and former English professors (@lycomayflower, @geatland and others) have sung the praises of this story in my hearing over the last 10 years or so, and they don't exaggerate.Review written in August 2014

[mawls · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I chose "really liked it" because there were some stories that I really loved. There were others that were interesting but didn't grab my attention as much.

The stories I loved were: A Little Cloud, The Dead, and A Mother.

[kplatypus_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Maybe this will make me sound like a donkey, but I didn't know this was a collection of short stories going in so when the story in the first chapter was not picked up in the second, it came as quite a surprise. I'm not generally a big fan of short stories, but there was something appealing about these. They weren't page-turning, gripping adventures, by any means, but they drew fascinating little portraits of everyday people, one by one painting a picture of Dublin as seen by Joyce.My first attempt at Joyce was Finnegan's Wake, which turned out to be, of course, a terrible idea. For several years I shunned the man due to that experience, in fact. Recently, however, I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and now Dubliners and I'm starting to see why people love him so. He's not the kind of writer that will end up on my favorites list, I suspect, but he's moved off of my most hated list as well. I tend to like blasting, emotionally-charged, flowery, intense books- like Edith Wharton, Thomas Hardy, Dostoevsky, and their ilk- so the pleasure that I'm finding in Joyce, which is more of a seeping-in, slowly absorbed pleasure, is quite a change. Rarely do I read in such small chunks but I found that I could only enjoy Dubliners when I read a singe story then let it settle for a while. One of these days I will try Ulysses and then, when I'm feeling brave (and have a guide), Finnegan's Wake. Got to work my way up to them though.

[santhony_35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

While shopping for books recently on Amazon, I was trying to upgrade my reading list through the addition of some “classics” that I’d avoided in the past. In doing so, I discovered a couple of relatively short works by authors that were somewhat intimidating by reputation. Having done a little research, I was pretty sure that authors such as Camus, Sartre, Joyce and Faulkner would probably not be to my liking. Nevertheless, I picked up Camus’ The Plague and Dubliners by James Joyce, emboldened by their brevity. In hindsight, I’m glad I did, though I’m unlikely to delve much deeper.This short (140 relatively dense pages) work is a compilation of short stories centered upon the Irish city of Dublin near the turn of the 20th century. These short stories are VERY short, most in the range of 5-10 pages long. I don’t necessarily dislike short stories, however I like for my short stories to be at least long enough to actually tell a story and this collection fails in that regard. Many of the offerings merely paint a tapestry, albeit in beautiful prose, but fall short of actually engaging the reader. In truth, there are no “stories” as much as vignettes. They were very reminiscent of many of the short Hemingway stories I’d read; beautifully written, but too short to capture my interest.I was quite disappointed after having read the first three or four very short vignettes, but it soon became apparent that the short stories were coalescing into a larger picture and the reader begins to get a more complete picture of the city, its people and their culture. Then, the final story, The Dead, proves a fitting capstone to the collection. Far longer than the other stories, at about 30 pages, it is by far the most powerful and memorable of the stories.Bottom line: This is a very short book containing very short stories, most of which are TOO short for my taste. Taken as a collection, however, they serve the purpose of making the reader familiar with the city, its people and their period in history. The final work makes the entire effort worthwhile. It was a two star effort through the first half, becoming three star as the stories coalesced, vaulted to four star by the final story.

[miguelnunonave · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A collection of short stories by Ireland's greatest writer. An impressive analysis of the social spectrum. And so much shorter than Ulysses (which I still must read, absolutely...)

[sloopjonb · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The rating is for 'The Dead', the only story I have so far read, which was an incredible piece of writing. If only Joyce had carried on this vein, and not vanished up his own fundament, the show-off.

[raven9167 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this collection because I doubt anyone writes short stories like this anymore. Dubliners is composed of vignettes looking into the lives of ordinary people and does not aspire to show extraordinary moments but rather the small ones that happen everyday. Although many of the stories feature epiphanies rendered from these small moments, others simply depict in realistic fashion an experience that could happen to anyone with no reflection by the character whatsoever. My favorites from the collection are Araby, Eveline, Two Gallants, The Boarding House, A Little Cloud, Clay, A Painful Case, A Mother, Grace, and of course, The Dead. One may notice I have listed there 10 of the 15 stories, and I suppose that is a reflection of how much I loved the book. It did take me over a year to complete, if only because I kept putting off reading The Dead because I wanted a suitable moment to give it its due consideration.

[missbrandysue · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

James Joyce's collection of 15 stories relating to regular Irish citizens felt like a time machine taking me back into the turn of the century Dublin city. The characters and problems in the stories are all relevant and relatable as normal people you might meet on the street in the past. There was a dark gloom over most situations and characters but Joyce left you with just enough hope and anticipation to think maybe, possibly, it just might end up ok for the specific character you were currently with.I purchased this book as I was preparing for my trip to Ireland but found that I didn't have time to conquer until a year later. As I read it I constantly had flashbacks to my trip. It was wonderful. I can appreciate the realism of the characters and the lack of a happy ending. I think if every story ends with a happy ending then what point will there be in reading on and on. I look forward to reading my next Joyce novel!

[kirmuriel-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As they say, the last one was the best. Things useful to know before reading: in Ireland there are two main groups in religion: catholics and protestants and in politics: Nationalists and Unionists. Nationalists are separatists and want the 'Home Rule'

[pieter_goldhoorn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A collection of stories about people in Dublin. All are more or less losers, but they cannot help it themselves. Beautifully written, especially The Dead.

[pilgrimjess · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Despite not being a fan of short stories this is the third such set I have read on the bounce folllowing on from Conan Doyle's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Hemingway's Snows of Kilimanjaro. I had hoped that this book would act as an easy introduction to Joyce and his works before tackling one of his novels. I was wrong.Now while I can sit back and admire the overall writing style the book just did not really grab me. Perhaps I am just unable to grasp the subtler symbolism of its message but with each story I felt that it had been just cut off in the middle just as I was finally getting into it.There is a common thread within the book as the main protagonists of each story move from childhood to middle aged to maturity and finally death but the disparate nature of the characters and their backgrounds only added to the confusion I felt.The descriptions of Dublin and its life were very evocative, the characterisation was good and I particularily enjoyed some of the banality of the dialogues although knowing that the book was written while the author was in self-imposedexile seems, to me at least, to bring into question some of its poignancy. That is on the plus side but on the negative was the heavy use of notes, something that I'm loathe to read anyway, throughout the book. Now I realise that this book was written over 100 years ago so some were neccessary. Some meanings I was able to guess without refering to the back while others were totally unnecessary but overall to me they just killed the flow of the story.I am not studying for some examination nor really interested in some in depth study of 19th Century Irish life but am merely reading for pleasure. So perhaps the real truth was that I just had to try to hard to get the message of this book and that is why it didn't really grab me. There is another Joyce book on my To Be Read pile and it may just sit there a good bit longer now.

[helenliz_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This isn't a cheery selection of stories, it's not displaying the famous Irish craig in any way. instead it has tales of death, disgrace, drunkenness, violence, danger, sacrifice of happiness and hope to duty and responsibility and other fun stuff like that. I sense that Joyce despaired of the inhabitants of the city, and was, possibly, trying to chock them into seeing themselves as he saw them, trapped in repetitive downwards spirals.That's not to say that the stories themselves aren't worth reading but don't expect to be uplifted by the story, although the way he can capture a mood in a few short pages is something to behold.

[daptolibrary · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It is surprising how easily our perception can be influenced. When it comes to classic literature, this is doubly so! How long have you had the idea that reading James Joyce is just too hard? Well this year our book club took the challenge and Joyce’s Dubliners has scored the highest yet. We were all in agreement that the writing was superb and that Joyce has that very Irish knack of telling a tale that is entertaining yet sorrowful. As we have said before … no one does it like the Irish!It was commented that the narration serves as an observer to what, in anyone else’s hands, would be ordinary, everyday stories. But Joyce has a way of bringing his characters to life with everything that makes us human. Clever turn of phrase and descriptive language all come together to weave a picture of Dublin at a time that it was truly Irish. Our discussion included an interesting look at Joyce himself and some of the challenges he faced getting published. As a group we also try to do a little background into authors. I helps to round out our discussions and also adds an extra dimension to what we learn from the literature we read.We shared real life experiences in Ireland and had plenty of opinions on the traditions and uniqueness of the Irish people. We also felt we were able to pin point the difficult position the country and its people were caught in at the time of Dubliners publication. Somewhere between the modern and traditional world. Something that only a writer of Joyce’s calibre would be able to deliver.

[meredk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Such wonderful writing! The book gets better the further you go, because the stories create a vivid picture of a city and time. Although these are short stories, in one sense this is a novel. Makes me think of "Winesburg, Ohio" (which I just realized I need to add to my list of books read).

[cacuzza · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

James Joyce is always called a "modernist" a this, a that, but on re-reading this volume for make this entry, I realized that I had never thought of him as "proto-existentialist"

[.monkey.-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

"When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of the sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street."James Joyce gives us 15 short stories about his old home of Dublin, from childhood to adolescence to mature life and public life. I can see and respect the skill in Joyce's writing. And the introduction provides a little further insight that sheds a slightly clearer light on the stories than I got from my unhappy reading. There are some slight feminist angles and he does well at portraying a certain kind of common life experienced there. And the last story—the "long" one at a whopping 40 pages—was certainly a positive demonstration of what Joyce was capable of producing. However. I did not enjoy this book. Most of the stories were dreadfully short, between a mere 5-10 pages; this is not enough time to flesh out a proper story, as far as I am concerned. Not enough can happen, or if something happens, there is not enough background to it to make it worth knowing that the something happened. It is quite difficult to feel much for a character you've only just been introduced to. Add to that, the stories are terribly bleak and melancholy. This is a common "feature" of the short story in general, for some reason it seems to lend itself to the style, but it is not something I appreciate in a bundle. Why must they all be that way? Surely not everyone in Ireland was living with/were rotten abusive drunken men!Now admittedly, I do not, as a rule, care for short stories. I mostly only read them from favored authors, or collections of genres or region or whathaveyou. But on occasion, some other author's short stories make their way into my hands, for some reason or other. I generally do not wind up enamored with them on such occasions, but one never knows. So, it should come as no surprise that I was not thrilled with this volume. Even so, I disliked reading this little book far more than any other collection I have read. "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."If you enjoy short stories, this is probably a good read for you. If you're not especially fond of them, run away!

[thatotter-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Really liked The Dead. Some of the others had their moments, but I didn't like that most of them were more like vignettes than actual short stories.

[edgeworth_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I have a list of major authors whom I’ve never read in a Notepad file: Dickens, Faulkner, Carver, Woolf, etc. This stems from being a young reader in the 21st century, looking back across history at the overwhelming weight of the human canon. My theory is that while there are far too many great books in the world for anybody to read in one lifetime, you should try to read at least one book from all the major authors, to sample their style and see if they take your fancy or not, to discover whether you want to pursue their works further. James Joyce is on that list, and since there is not a chance in hell I’m ever going to read Ulysses, I thought it appropriate to read his short story anthology Dubliners.I’m not going to try to talk my way around it: I hated this book. It was extremely tedious. Rarely did any of the fifteen stories gathered within capture my attention in any way; more often than not, I found myself distracted and daydreaming, and had to keep snapping my focus back to the page. I finished the book yesterday and can properly summarise exactly zero of the stories for you. I can tell you virtually nothing about the plots they contain, let alone the thematic weight they are supposed to carry. This is not to say that they are bad or useless or pointless; merely that whatever literary heft they have was lost on this reader. Dubliners, just so we’re clear, is not written in the same deliberately confusing modernist stream-of-consciousness style that Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are. It’s a perfectly normal, ordinary style of writing. It’s just very, very boring.I’m not a stupid or crass reader. I have read, enjoyed, appreciated and even loved the works of Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey, to name a few. But I hated Dubliners, and if that makes me a philistine then so be it.

[baswood · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A slim volume of fifteen short stories make up James Joyce's first prose book published in 1914. They are easy to read apart from a few obscure Irish phrases and it soon becomes apparent that Joyce is writing with a realism and insight that must have seemed quite modern when they first appeared. They are slices of middle class life told in a simple fashion with no sudden plot twists or trickery and may at first seem rather inconsequential, however they are certainly not that and build up to "The Dead" one of the best short stories I have ever read. The book has an accumulative power with that final story bringing together many of the strands and themes that appear earlier in the shorter tales. All the stories are beautifully crafted with characters that are sketched in with such a preciseness that the reader feels at home with them straight away. The reader is never surprised with the actions (or in many cases inactions) that they take; they are a product of their times and those times are superbly caught by the author. Catholic Ireland in the first decade of the twentieth century was smarting under English rule and while a Nationalist uprising was just around the corner the middle class characters that inhabit Joyce stories seem as wary of the Nationalist as they are of English rule and while the political situation does not dominate their lives it is in the background to many of the stories, however Joyce is interested in the way people behave within their own community and his insights into the human condition are just as relevant today. Missed opportunities or a failure to follow a dream is a theme that predominates, but in many of the stories it would seem to me that the characters are better off not chasing that dream. The events in their lives lead many of them to an epiphany of some sort, it could be a crossroads, but the tragedy is that some of them only realise this after the opportunity has passed them by. There are no risks taken, characters are content to live the lives that they are born into, conventions are followed and you have to say that many of the choices made are inevitable and may even be the right choices. In "An Encounter" an adventurous young lad is curious about a strange man, who the reader can see could be a paedophile. In "Eveline" a young domestic is given the chance to run away to Argentina with a man who she may love. In "Araby" a teenager is desperate to get to a local Bazaar to buy a present for a girl on whom he has a crush. In "A Painful Case" James Duffy a confirmed bachelor meets a married woman whose company he yearns for and whom he finds intellectually stimulating. Many of the stories touch on situations that many of us will have come across; if not in our own lives then in the lives of friends or acquaintances and we cannot help but be drawn into the consequences for the characters in Joyce's stories.Once the reader is used to the idea that the stories seem to follow a natural course he can let the prose do it's work; which is to capture the milieu of middle class life, to enter into the thoughts and feelings in such a way that there in no feeling of intrusion. Joyce is a master of non manipulation; their is no preaching, no moral stance, people behave as they will with few surprises; it is left to the reader to appreciate what he has just read and to follow his own reaction to the events that take place. There are few writers that can tap into my thoughts and feelings the way that Joyce can in [Dubliners] and [A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man]. The first story "Sisters" starts with the death of an old priest about whom there may be something untoward and the effect on a young lad who has grown close to him. The last story "The Dead" continues the grand theme of the march towards death by invoking the dead in the actions and thoughts of a party of friends gathering for a Christmas celebration. This masterful story brings many of the other stories into focus with a symbol of a snowfall that appears to deaden the lives of Joyce's characters; some marvellous prose completes the story:Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling" After all the realism of the earlier stories Joyce's final lurch into the metaphysical world has the power of contrast that juxtaposes all that has gone before. A five star read.

[gbill_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

15 short stories which paint a picture of life in “dear, dirty Dublin” in the first decade of the 20th century. It’s a little uneven, with some of the stories too short or less interesting, yet is certainly worth reading. My favorites were “A Little Cloud”, in which a man comes to grips with his failed literary dreams and the idea that his baby son was now getting all of the attention from his wife, and the last story, “The Dead”, which has an awkward and insecure man pondering life and death, and just how little he knows about his wife’s past. That gives you a taste for the moments of self-realization, or ‘epiphanies’, the characters in these unflinchingly honest stories feel.

[lozbeth1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The stories are very well written, however just not long enough to get connected to the characters which is a shame.

[rbeffa_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

James Joyce is one of those classic authors on my "to-do" list. One of many who I should have read or only read lightly. Others include Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner. There is a rather large lot of them. Even some like Thomas Hardy and Hemingway who I liked a lot in my younger days is under-read by me. So finally some Joyce. Some thoughts:The Dubliners is a collection of 15 stories set in Dublin Ireland. Together they can be seen as a novel. The first story was published in 1904. The last in 1907. Some of these stories were apparently quite controversial at the the time. I read a little background material before tackling this. Doing so made me wonder if I could really appreciate this a century after they were written. I was ready for bleak. Stories I've read set in Ireland such as McCourt's [Angela's Ashes] have more than convinced me of the overwhelming crushing poverty and sadness for endless decades. Bleak is what I got, but not overwhelming; more just like a great melancholy laying over many stories. Some are frankly depressing, almost enought to make one cry. These are small snapshots of moments in ordinary people's lives. I thought most of them were quite good. The writing is beautiful. As for my trepidations of not being able to fully appreciate these in their time, I think it was a little true. I wasn't quite sure what was going on at times and with the dialogue between characters. Other stories were 100% understandable. Someone with a depth of knowledge of the times and Irish history would probably get more from these stories, but I had no major problems other than being unfamiliar with a word here and there and some sensibilities. The stories really grew into something bigger than the pieces and my appreciation got ever larger. Very fine stuff here. I'm glad to have finally tackled Joyce. He is without a doubt a storyteller. Quite a good read.

[hazzabamboo · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Enjoyed all but a couple of these stories. Dublin, the time and the characters come through fully formed. Apart from a couple - 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room' for example, though that was partly because I don't know enough the history of Irish politics. 'The Dead' is celebrated according to my edition, and it's easy to see why, though not by describing its plot. That's the strength though - it's a dinner party with dancing, nothing more dramatic than that on the surface, but there are many more stories subsumed within, and you can't help but share some of Gabriel's feelings as time goes on.

[seriousgrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dubliners is comprised of 15 short and simple stories all centered around the people of Dublin. To sum up the collection it is a portrait of a city as seen from the eyes of the people living there. The very first story, The Sisters, is nothing more than a family's reaction to a priest's death. While the characters are not connected, their stories are. Life and death, love and loss, youth and aging, poverty and wealth. Joyce does a remarkable job capturing the spirit of the Irish while revealing universal truths about mankind as a whole. It is as if we, as readers, get to peek into the character's lives and are witness to moments of our own circumstance.

[catrionaolding3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Dead is quite the most moving love story I've ever read. For anyone who's lost someone.