Dubliners by James Joyce

First published: 1914

Type of work: Short fiction

The Work

James Joyce, the preeminent experimental modernist, began Dubliners with a version of “The Sisters.” A first-person narrative, it appeared in a 1904 issue of Irish Homestead under the pseudonym Stephen Daedalus. Thus the narrator was part of the story, its now mature protagonist. A character of the same name was already the protagonist of an autobiographical novel-in-progress, Stephen Hero, that ultimately became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914–15). Stephen Dedalus (why Joyce changed the spelling of the last name is uncertain) would also be a major character in Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses (1922).

Stephen’s namesake, Daedalus, the first artist of Greek mythology, is most famous for inventing human flight by combining mundane things—feathers, frames, wax, and knowledge about birds. Like the father of flight, “Stephen Daedalus” uses everyday life in his art, creating soaring insights. Joyce called such insights epiphanies, analogs of the epiphanic belief of New Testament Magi that the manger-housed infant of a Jewish newlywed was their God. Joyce no longer believed in the religious Epiphany but thought art should yield epiphanic insights using mundane facts and events.

Initially, he planned a dozen stories, arranged into four categories. Including a revision of “The Sisters,” there would be three stories each, devoted to childhood, adolescence, mature life, and public life. By 1907, he had created a fifth category, married life. Stories on married life were inserted between the stories of adolescence and mature life. “The Sisters,” first of the childhood stories, is about a boy’s relationship with his teacher, Father Flynn, who just died. The boy’s uncle and aunt, who are raising him, and their friend Cotter wonder what happened between the two. The uncle defends Flynn, suggesting that he had a “great wish” for the boy—presumably the priesthood—and the speculation seems to be corroborated by what the boy studied: Latin and priestly duties to the Eucharist and the confessional, in which sinners are absolved in absolute confidentiality. The boy is awed by those duties and, it is suggested, thinks Father Flynn wanted him in the order until he learns through the denials of Flynn’s sisters that Flynn spilled sanctified wine, failing in his duty to the Eucharist, and was found paralyzed, helplessly laughing to himself in the confessional. These facts, which Flynn could not share because of a “too scrupulous” duty to the confessional, enable the boy to realize epiphanically that Father Flynn did not intend to awe and to attract but rather to awe and to dissuade him from becoming a priest.

“An Encounter” leads to its protagonist’s realization that his attitude toward his fellows has been wanting. Searching for adventure, he and his classmate Mahoney ditch school. The Dillon boys do not join them, and the protagonist takes pleasure in imagining a disciplinarian caning one of them. When a perverse, scholarly old man who disdains common children confesses to the protagonist a delight in administering whippings, the protagonist recognizes a destructive parallel in himself. In “Penitent,” he acknowledges the loyal Mahoney as a friend who does not deserve the disdain he felt for him.

“Araby” concludes the childhood group with an epiphanic story about love. The shy protagonist, infatuated with “Mangan’s sister,” is approached by her one day. She wonders whether he will be going to Araby, a bazaar. She would love to go, she says. When he asks why she cannot, she blames a retreat at her convent. Determined to buy her something, the protagonist goes to the bazaar alone and finds a saleswoman flirting with two men: She claims that she did not say something; they claim that she did. In that context, the love-smitten boy realizes that Mangan’s sister had discretely offered to accompany him to the bazaar. Her covert offer would have allowed her to deny doing so if he had teased her about it; too naïve to realize what she was doing, and too shy to say, “Let’s go together,” he loses the opportunity by assuming she could not go. Crushed, the boy leaves without buying anything.

For the boy, experience yields insight. Protagonists of the remaining narratives, with the possible exception of “The Dead,” end benighted. In the subsequent stories of Dubliners, epiphanies are reserved for readers.

The adolescents are all failures. Eveline, in the story that bears her name, wants her beau Frank to resemble her dead brother Ernest, who protected her from their violent father. However, doubting Frank’s intentions, she fails to determine whether Frank’s offer to spirit her to Buenos Aires is earnest or useful. Instead, a frightened animal, she freezes at the boarding ramp of the boat on which Frank leaves.

Jimmy Doyle, of “After the Race,” thinks he is a companion to the automobile racers he follows. Instead, they bilk the do-nothing butcher’s son of his cash. They get him drunk, fleece him at cards, and leave him in a stupor to await “daybreak.”

Lenehan and Corley, aging protagonists of “Two Gallants,” the final story of adolescence, are even worse off. Lenehan, a leech in a yachting cap, follows in John Corley’s wake. Both perpetually need cash, and Corley uses a stratagem to obtain some. While Lenehan eats peas, contemplates marriage to a rich woman, and worries, Corley persuades the homely servant he is servicing to steal from her employer. Thus J. C. (who aspirates the first letter of his name, rendering it Whorely) sells love, and Lenehan is his disciple.

The stories of marriage are no more idyllic. In “The Boarding House,” Bob Doran only thinks he sowed wild oats. Meek, he is coerced into marrying Polly Mooney, daughter of “the Madam” who runs the house. Polly, under her mother’s eye, allures him, and at the proper moment the Madam demands that Doran save her daughter’s honor or face exposure. Fearful, he acquiesces in a marriage that bodes ill from before the start.

Timid Little Chandler of “A Little Cloud” is already married. Father of an infant whom his wife prefers to him, he dreams of becoming a poet. He imagines reviews of his Celtic poems, but no verse issues from him. He would like to emulate his friend Gallaher, who escapes provincial life by becoming a reporter, and when Gallaher visits, Chandler meets him at Corless’s, a risqué nightclub that Chandler used to hurry past in trembling excitement. Alas, Gallaher now disdains Ireland. He affects an English accent, dresses like an Englishman, and is touchy about his failure to marry. Chandler sees through Gallaher’s bravado briefly but on returning home falls back into blind admiration. His wife upbraids Gallaher for upsetting her “little mannie,” and Chandler weeps.

Bulky Farrington of “Counterparts” lashes out instead. A cog in the machine of modern commerce, his physical strength is useless in his job as scrivener. At work, pink, hairless Mr. Alleyne dominates him. Farrington’s small wage keeps him subject, and when he wastes the six shillings he gets pawning his watch by standing a round of drinks, an aggravated awareness of his constraints grips him. His attempt to arm-wrestle a circus performer compromises his physical power, and, utterly defeated, he asserts dominance at home by beating his son, blindly striking a blow at himself through his one hope for the future.

The stories of mature life concern people with dismal pasts and no future. Maria of “Clay,” a nanny once, reared children who were not hers. A woman who offered motherly attention without the office of mother, she lives now at the Dublin by Lamplight laundry, where women who once sold sex without the office of wife seek shelter. On her way to a visit with her former charge Joe, she is confused by kind words from a tipsy gentleman and disembarks without the plumcake she is bringing. Joe is gracious about it, but his children resent her suggestion that they took the cake. In a game designed to predict the future, they and the girls next door trick Maria into choosing a saucer of clay, suggesting the grave. Joe’s wife substitutes a prayer-book, anticipating life in a convent, but the first choice stands. When Maria sings “I Dreamt That I Dwelt,” she repeats the nostalgic first verse, leaving out the verse that refers to future love.

James Duffy, of “A Painful Case,” likewise lacks prospects, but he embraces bleakness. He lives at a distance even from himself, writes about himself in the third person, and, when an opportunity arises to strike up friendships with Mrs. Sinico and her daughter, becomes friendly only with the mother, possibly thinking married women physically unavailable. When she seeks intimate relations, he breaks off the friendship, noting that love between men is impossible because sex must be avoided and friendship with women is impossible because sex cannot be avoided. Disapproving his own impulses, Duffy condemns himself to an isolation that is finalized four years later by Mrs. Sinico’s perhaps accidental death.

Not only isolation but absence is the highest presence in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.” At a gathering of political canvassers on the anniversary of Charles Stewart Parnell’s death, when all who honor him wear sprigs of ivy, drinking outweighs politics. When Parnell’s loyal follower, Joe Hynes, reads his poorly crafted but heartfelt tribute to “Ireland’s uncrowned king” (Parnell), the unsympathetic Mr. Croften robs it of value by praising the writing.

Public life, whether artistic, religious, or celebratory, is equally frustrating. Mrs. Kearney, of “A Mother,” wants to manage her pianist daughter’s career but loses sight of her goal. Her dispute with Mr. Holohan over remuneration leads him to deny future employment to the girl.

Father Purdon of “Grace” offers businessmen salvation at a price. Tom Kernan, a drunken salesman, needs to reform, and his friends, led by Messrs. Power and Cunningham, take him to church, where Purdon’s sermon twists the parable of the unjust steward (Luke 16: 8–9) into a “spiritual accountant[’s]” call for compromise.

“The Dead,” last in the series, combines all categories. Gabriel Conroy, attending a Feast of Epiphany party at the home of his aunts one snowy evening, likes to think of himself as liberated, but he is trapped on many fronts. He imagines that he is genteel, but, when he finds himself alone with Lily, the maid, he is attracted. A college teacher, he married Gretta, a Connacht girl disdained by his now dead mother as “country cute”; he still smarts at the characterization. Imagining himself above politics, he is wounded when his colleague, the political activist Molly Ivors, playfully accuses him of abandoning Ireland. He thinks he disdains his aunts and cousin, but he delivers a speech at the party and carves the goose. He creates a life for Gretta, but she does not play the roles he assigns; when they rent a hotel room her thoughts never approach his erotic imaginings. Gretta is thinking of sickly Michael Furey, who in her teen years exposed himself to the cold for her, worsened, and died. Gabriel, preoccupied with thoughts of being alone with his wife at evening’s end, fails to see that for her the evening has been a pining regret over lost youthful love and guilt over Michael’s death. Forced to confront his failures, Gabriel, in his own epiphany, sees his living relationship with his wife as less significant than the love of the long-dead Michael, and, in a snowy vision of the living and dead united, resolves to travel westward into Ireland, where he can meet his demise. His understanding, however, is still partial; incomplete recognition can lead to a paralysis as damaging as ignorance.

Joyce was anticipated by the late nineteenth-century Russian Anton Chekhov in the writing of apparently plotless stories of everyday life that nevertheless yielded insights into entrapment, frustration, and psychological paralysis. Joyce was first to see such stories as epiphanic and, in Dubliners, produced one of the first collections of stories geographically and thematically linked into a single work of transcendent art.

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