Dubliners

Summary

Dubliners, published in 1914 after nearly a decade of disputes with publishers, is James Joyce's collection of fifteen short stories about the people of Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century. Joyce said he wanted to write a chapter of the moral history of his country and chose Dublin because it seemed to him the centre of paralysis. The stories are arranged in the order of a life: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. In the first three, told by boy narrators, a child confronts the death of a priest in 'The Sisters', meets a disturbing stranger in 'An Encounter', and in 'Araby' goes to a bazaar to buy a gift for a girl and arrives too late, seeing himself as a creature driven and derided by vanity. In 'Eveline' a young woman prepares to elope to Buenos Aires but cannot board the ship. Later stories show clerks, lodging-house keepers, singers and political canvassers trapped in routine, drink, debt and small hypocrisies: 'Counterparts', in which a humiliated clerk beats his son; 'Clay', about a gentle laundress; 'A Painful Case', about a solitary man who rejects love and later learns of the woman's death; 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room', on the memory of Parnell; and 'Grace', a comic story of a drunken man's friends taking him to a retreat. Many stories turn on what Joyce called an epiphany, a sudden revelation of the truth of a moment. The collection ends with 'The Dead', its longest and greatest story. At a Christmas party given by his aunts, Gabriel Conroy delivers a speech and later learns that his wife Gretta still grieves for Michael Furey, a boy who loved her and died young. Gabriel realizes how little he has known her, and as snow falls over Ireland he feels a new sympathy for all the living and the dead. Joyce's precise, ironic and compassionate realism makes the book one of the great story collections in English and a fine introduction to his work.

Top Lessons

• Paralysis and epiphany

  Joyce shows people trapped by habit who glimpse the truth in a sudden moment.

• The ordinary as art

  Joyce writes about ordinary people with great care.

• 'The Dead'

  Gabriel's discovery changes his view of his wife and himself.

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