Fragments of "A Painful Case" and "Paper Pills"
Although James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson situate their subjects in very different milieux (Joyce's in Dublin; Anderson's in Winesburg, Ohio), two of their subjects speak the same language of idiosyncrasy. In Joyce's "A Painful Case," Mr. Duffy keeps on his desk "a little sheaf of papers held together by a brass pin. In these sheets a sentence was inscribed from time to time and, in an ironical moment, the headline of an advertisement for Bile Beans had been pasted on to the first sheet" (Joyce 103). In Anderson's "Paper Pills," Dr. Reefy records his thoughts on "scraps of paper that became hard balls and were thrown away" (Anderson 36). These scribbled bits of subjectivity offer insight into the constituions of Anderson's doctor and Joyce's painful case.
Living "in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen" (Joyce 103), Mr. Duffy provides an example of the unwittingly mechanized individual. Mr. Duffy attempts "to preserve an interior life of introspection against the overwhelming and machine-like activities of city life" (134) but he resembles nothing so much as a well-oiled machine. Duffy tries to live self-contained in the gap between nature and culture, when these terms are defined so that "we can see the infant's relation to the mother as somehow 'natural' and the post-Oedipal child as one who is in the process of assuming a position within the cultural order as a whole" (Eagleton 156). Associating with "neither companions nor friends, church nor creed" (Joyce 105), Duffy removes himself from familial and societal ties and from "his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances" (104). The first threat to...
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...uded the world. It became terrible and then faded away and the little thoughts began again" (37). In this cycle of univocity and fragmentation, even the twisted apples have their day in the sun. As opposed to Duffy's ordered collage, Reefy's confounding lack of order -- in a different twist of Modernist irony -- assure his wholeness and his health.
Works Cited
Anderson, Sherwood. "Paper Pills." Winesburg, Ohio. Ed. John H. Ferres. New York:Viking Penguin, 1977. 35-8.
Butler, Christopher. Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
Joyce, James. "A Painful Case." Dubliners . New York: Penguin, 1993. 103-14.
---. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.. Ed. Chester G. Anderson. New York: Viking Penguin, 1977.
"An Artists's Life." Litzmann, Berthold. An Artist's Life. New York: Da Capo Press, 1979. 532. Book.
30. Drucker, G. (1987) The Defining characteristic of Society: Postpatriarchialist deconstruction in the works of Joyce. Cambridge University Press
Throughout the novel Dubliners, James Joyce renders the theme of paralysis and the aspiration to escape through his compilation of fictional short stories. Joyce depicts the impotent individuals who endeavor the idea of escaping, but are often paralyzed by their situations, resulting in their inability to escape the separate circumstances exemplified within each short story. Furthermore, the recurring theme of escape and paralysis is evident within the short stories, “An Encounter”, “Eveline”, and “A Little Cloud.” Consequently, these short stories imparts the protagonists’ perspectives to subdue the paralysis of their situations and conveys their inability to escape their undesirable conditions, constraining them to inadequate lives.
“Dubliners” by James Joyce was first published in 1914. It is a collection of short stories, which takes place in the same general area and time frame, moving from one individual’s story to the next. Boysen in “The Necropolis of Love: James Joyce’s Dubliners” discuses the way the citizens of Dublin are caught in this never ending misery because of the lack of love- mainly instituted by the “criminalization of sensual love” from the church- and the economic stress, and struggle to survive. Zack Brown goes through the individual short stories, pointing out their references to paralysis, as well as a few other themes in “Joyce’s Prophylactic Paralysis: Exposure in “Dubliners.”” “James Joyce’s usage of Diction in Representation of Irish Society in Dubliners” by Daronkolaee discuses the background knowledge of the culture and particular details of the city that enhance the understanding of the reader and enforce the ideas presented by Boysen and broken down by Brown. These analytical articles help support the idea that Joyce uses
James Joyce is the author of Dubliners, a compilation of Irish short stories that reflect on the feelings he associates with the city of Dublin, where he grew up in a large impoverished family. After he graduated from the University College, Dublin, Joyce went to live abroad in Paris, France. This action indicates a sense of entrapment that led to his desire to escape. The situations in his stories differ significantly, but each character within these stories experiences this sense of escape that Joyce had. In “An Encounter”, two boys make their first real move at being independent by skipping school to explore Dublin. In “Eveline”, the main character has a choice between taking care of her unstable father or leaving him to lead a new life with a man she has been seeing. In Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” a young man is thrown into deep human assessment, becomes unsure of who he is, and soon after is frightened of this newly discovered truth. The stories in Dubliners implicate this need for independence through characters in different situations and experiencing the feeling of entrapment.
CHD is primarily due to atherosclerosis, which is the blockage of blood flow in the arteries due to the accumulation of fats, cholesterol, calcium and other substances found in the blood. Atherosclerosis takes place over many years, but when the blood flow becomes so limited due to the build up of plaque in the arteries, there becomes a serious problem. “When...
James Joyce created a collection of short stories in Dubliners describing the time and place he grew up in. At the time it was written, Joyce intends to portray to the people of Dublin the problems with the Irish lifestyles. Many of these stories share a reoccurring theme of a character’s desire to escape his or her responsibilities in regards to his relationship with his, job, money situation, and social status; this theme is most prevalent in After the Race, Counterparts, and The Dead.
Goldwater, Robert and Marco Treves (eds.). Artists on Art: from the XIV to the XX Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1945.
1. Hunter, Sam and Jacobs, John. Modern Art, 3rd Edition. The Vendome Press, New York, 1992.
The purpose of this essay is to connect the feminist theory to the film “The Help,” and underlie certain ideas that are demonstrated throughout the film. I specifically chose this film, because it takes place in Jackson, Mississippi during the early 19060s during the time Jim Crow laws were still very much alive, and practiced. Skeeter, a young white Caucasian woman has just graduated and returned home from attending Ole Miss to take care of her fairly sick mother. Aside from her associates and colleagues, who are more into finding a husband on their time off from Ole Miss, Skeeter focuses all of her time into becoming a journalist. Throughout the film family servants are well within each white family social circle, they are referred to as “The Help,” and are exclusively black women. As tradition the servants are passed down throughout family generations, which means the child they raised would become their boss in the future. Each servant had their own story to tell and conflicts of their own to deal with, including Skeeter. As time progresses Skeeter decides to write a column on the black servants in relation to their white bosses, with the help of her fifty-year-old servant Aibileen Clark. Hesitant to help, Aibleen along with other black servants gather to tell their different stories while accepting the consequences it will bring. As a feminist, it is one who supports feminism, which is the advocacy of women’s right on the grounds of politics, social, and equality to men, but in this case white women as well. Throughout the essay are explorations of the different issues relevant to feminism.
A collection of short stories published in 1907, Dubliners, by James Joyce, revolves around the everyday lives of ordinary citizens in Dublin, Ireland (Freidrich 166). According to Joyce himself, his intention was to "write a chapter of the moral history of [his] country and [he] chose Dublin for the scene because the city seemed to [b]e the centre of paralysis" (Friedrich 166). True to his goal, each of the fifteen stories are tales of disappointment, darkness, captivity, frustration, and flaw. The book is divided into four sections: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life (Levin 159). The structure of the book shows that gradually, citizens become trapped in Dublin society (Stone 140). The stories portray Joyce's feeling that Dublin is the epitome of paralysis and all of the citizens are victims (Levin 159). Although each story from Dubliners is a unique and separate depiction, they all have similarities with each other. In addition, because the first three stories -- The Sisters, An Encounter, and Araby parallel each other in many ways, they can be seen as a set in and of themselves. The purpose of this essay is to explore one particular similarity in order to prove that the childhood stories can be seen as specific section of Dubliners. By examining the characters of Father Flynn in The Sisters, Father Butler in An Encounter, and Mangan's sister in Araby, I will demonstrate that the idea of being held captive by religion is felt by the protagonist of each story. In this paper, I argue that because religion played such a significant role in the lives of the middle class, it was something that many citizens felt was suffocating and from which it was impossible to get away. Each of the three childhood stories uses religion to keep the protagonist captive. In The Sisters, Father Flynn plays an important role in making the narrator feel like a prisoner. Mr. Cotter's comment that "… a young lad [should] run about and play with young lads of his own age…" suggests that the narrator has spent a great deal of time with the priest. Even in death, the boy can not free himself from the presence of Father Flynn (Stone 169) as is illustrated in the following passage: "But the grey face still followed me. It murmured; and I understood that it desired to confess something.
In the novel's opening story, "The Sisters," Joyce elevates this concern with writing "reality" from sub-theme to theme: the story is an extended meditation on textuality just as much as it is the story of a boy and a priest. By beginning with a metatext Joyce brilliantly opens up the entire collection for a different kind of reading, one based on noticing rather than overlooking literature's limitations. With...
The organization is an expansion from the first story to the last. I believe that the two stories that begin and end the collection are most important and they hold the most significant elements of Dublin life. It is very important that the collection begins and ends with death and that we regard how all the generations are affected by it. In Fritz Senn’s article “‘He Was Too Scrupulous Always’ James Joyce’s ‘The Sisters’” he talks about the deeper meaning of the word “paralysis”. The word is looked at as “strange” to the boy narrator and he takes a more literal meaning to the word (67-68). Senn believes, “all through his career Joyce seemed incapable of using words in one single bare sense only” (66). Senn throughout his article takes a look at the deeper meaning of the word paralysis and how Joyce was able to use this word in every sense of it through “The Sisters” and also brings in “The Dead”. I have chosen to agree with Fritz Senn’s claim that Joyce brings deeper meaning to the word “paralysis” in his compilation of Dubliners, but I will display a new idea of how paralysis has affected the generations that are shown throughout “The Sisters”, “A Mother”, “Eveline”, and “The Dead”. The characters in these stories represent the idea of generations being paralyzed, most likely resulting from previous generations’
In Dubliners, James Joyce tells short stories of individuals struggling with life, in the city of Dublin. “It is a long road that has no turning” (Irish Proverb). Many individuals fight the battle and continue on the road. However, some give up and get left behind. Those who continue to fight the battle, often deal with constant struggle and suffering. A reoccurring theme, in which Joyce places strong emphasis on, is the constant struggle of fulfilling responsibilities. These responsibilities include; work, family and social expectations. Joyce writes about these themes because characters often feel trapped and yearn to escape from these responsibilities. In “The Little Cloud”, “Counterparts”, and “The Dead” characters are often trapped in unhappy living situations, often leading to a desire of escape from reality and daily responsibilities.
In the poem “To Autumn” the initial impression that we get is that Keats is describing a typical Autumn day with all its colors and images. On deeper reading it becomes evident that it is more than just that. The poem is rather a celebration of the cycle of life and acceptance that death is part of life.