James Joyce's Dubliners
The struggle that the Irish people must face with the problems of their society can be seen clearly in the book Dubliners, by James Joyce. This book portrays a unique image of what the Irish people are experiencing during the time. However, this book gives a deeper view of what really is occurring because it gives us the themes of the problems that are happening in a peculiar way. In fact, one can see throughout the stories the humanities theme of individual and society, and the literary theme of journey and escape. Moreover, there is a similarity of these themes between the stories of Araby, A Mother and, The Dead. Meaning, that each of the characters has a journey because they are affected in a positive or negative way by an individual or society.
In the story of Araby, the humanities theme of individual and society can be linked with the literary theme of journey and escape. The main reason for this is that the main character in this particular story has a journey that benefits or affects him with an individual or society. In the first place, the principal character, a young boy, realizes that he is in love with this girl that is the sister of a friend of his. This character mention us that he gets nervous every time he sees her, but most important of all is the fact that he says that everywhere he goes, her image accompanies him (22). For this boy, every time he goes to the market with his aunt, it is a journey for him because he gets distracted with every single characteristic of the atmosphere, because they all remind him of her. When he visits the market with his aunt, it is for the principal character a quest because he thinks frequently of the girl and hi...
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...nd morals.
One can see that the humanities theme of individual and society with the literary theme of journey and escape can be seen clearly in the three stories of Araby, A Mother, and The Dead. These stories represent the hard situation that the people of Ireland had to face a long time ago. In addition, these themes are consequences of the horrible atmosphere that people in Ireland had to deal with. All these stories have in common the search of an identity and recognition of the society, but they also have in common that at the end they cannot accomplish their journeys and they decide to escape and start all over again. As has been said, these stories in Dubliners show clearly that no matter what one journeys are, they wont be always perfect and that is why one must escape and start all over again to find the correct journey in ones 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
In the story “Araby,” the boy has a negative view of the community. Many aspects of his life affect the way he sees the things around him. For example, because of his uncle, he is unable to reach the bazaar in time. This makes him angry and frustrated. Although the boy reminds his uncle about the bazaar, his uncle forgets and comes home very late and the boy says to himself, “I asked him to give me the money to go to the bazaar. He had forgotten (25).” He teases the boy and tells him not to go, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” meaning working too hard with no fun makes you a boring person. Because all the boy’s desires are focused on his goal of getting the gift at the bazaar, he becomes frustrated. The boys’ uncle is one of the people the boy is around all the time; this frustration causes him to become very jittery and get irritated with the world around him. By things like the clock ticking it gradually drove him to just have to totally change his train of thought and just dwell on the girl and the boy thinks, “...
"Eveline" is the story of a young teenager facing a dilemma where she has to choose between living with her father or escaping with Frank, a sailor which she has been courting for some time. The story is one of fifteen stories written by James Joyce in a collection called "Dubliners". These stories follow a certain pattern that Joyce uses to express his ideas: "Joyce's focus in Dubliners is almost exclusively on the middle-class Catholics known to himself and his family"(the Gale Group). Joyce's early life, family background, and his catholic background appear in the way he writes these stories. "Where Joyce usually relates his stories to events in his life, there are some stories which are actually events that took place in his life" (Joyce, Stanislaus). James Joyce in his letter to Grant Richard writes:
Search for Meaning in James Joyce's Dubliners Throughout Dubliners James Joyce deliberately effaces the traditional markers of the short story: causality, closure, etc. In doing so, "the novel continually offers up texts which mark their own complexity by highlighting the very thing which traditional realism seeks to conceal: the artifice and insufficiency inherent in a writer's attempt to represent reality.(Seidel 31)" By refusing to take a reductive approach towards the world(s) he presents on the page - to offer up "meaning" or "ending" - Joyce moves the reader into complex and unsettling epistemological and ontological realms. Meaning is no longer unitary and prescriptive, the author will not reveal (read impose) what the story "means" at its close and therefore we can't definitively "know" anything about it. Instead, meaning, like modernism, engenders its own multiplicity in Joyce's works, diffuses into something necessarily plural: meanings. An ontological crisis is inextricable from this crisis of meaning and representation.
In James Joyce’s Dubliners, the theme of escape tends to be a trend when characters are faced with critical decisions. Joyce’s novel presents a bleak and dark view of Ireland; his intentions by writing this novel are to illustrate people’s reasons to flee Ireland. In the stories “Eveline, “Counterparts”, and the “Dead”, characters are faced with autonomous decisions that shape their lives. This forlorn world casts a gloomy shadow over the characters of these stories. These stories are connected by their similar portrayal of Ireland. They clearly represent Joyce’s views on people’s discontent with Ireland.
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.
The short story “Araby” by James Joyce is told by what seems to be the first person point of view of a boy who lives just north of Dublin. As events unfold the boy struggles with dreams versus reality. From the descriptions of his street and neighbors who live close by, the reader gets an image of what the boy’s life is like. His love interest also plays an important role in his quest from boyhood to manhood. The final trip to the bazaar is what pushes him over the edge into a foreshadowed realization. The reader gets the impression that the narrator is the boy looking back on his epiphany as a matured man. The narrator of “Araby” looses his innocence because of the place he lives, his love interest, and his trip to the bazaar.
Written by the same author, “Araby” and “Eveline” are very similar in several aspects, both formal and contextual. As they are taken from the same collection of the short stories, namely “Dubliners”, these works develop the same theme – the life of those living in Dublin, their joys and problems, their ups and downs; therefore, it is logical that they share many similarities which may be traced while analyzing the main characters, the plot peculiarities, the themes and the conflict, the mood and the tone etc.
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.
Although “Araby” is a fairly short story, author James Joyce does a remarkable job of discussing some very deep issues within it. On the surface it appears to be a story of a boy's trip to the market to get a gift for the girl he has a crush on. Yet deeper down it is about a lonely boy who makes a pilgrimage to an eastern-styled bazaar in hopes that it will somehow alleviate his miserable life. James Joyce’s uses the boy in “Araby” to expose a story of isolation and lack of control. These themes of alienation and control are ultimately linked because it will be seen that the source of the boy's emotional distance is his lack of control over his life.
He has grown up in the backwash of a dying city and has developed into an individual sensitive to the fact that his town’s vivacity has receded, leaving the faintest echoes of romance, a residue of empty piety, and symbolic memories of an active concern for God and mankind that no longer exists. Although the young boy cannot fully comprehend it intellectually, he feels that his surroundings have become malformed and ostentatious. He is at first as blind as his surroundings, but Joyce prepares us for his eventual perceptive awakening by mitigating his carelessness with an unconscious rejection of the spiritual stagnation of his community. Upon hitting Araby, the boy realizes that he has placed all his love and hope in a world that does not exist outside of his imagination. He feels angry and betrayed and comes to realize his self-deception, describing himself as “a creature driven and derided by vanity”, a vanity all his own (Joyce). This, inherently, represents the archetypal Joycean epiphany, a small but definitive moment after which life is never quite the same. This epiphany, in which the boy lives a dream in spite of the disagreeable and the material, is brought to its inevitable conclusion, with the single sensation of life disintegrating. At the moment of his realization, the narrator finds that he is able to better understand his particular circumstance, but, unfortunately, this
In “Araby”, author James Joyce presents a male adolescent who becomes infatuated with an idealized version of a schoolgirl, and explores the consequences which result from the disillusionment of his dreams. While living with his uncle and aunt, the main character acts a joyous presence in an otherwise depressing neighborhood. In Katherine Mansfield’s, The Garden Party, Mansfield’s depicts a young woman, Laura Sherridan, as she struggles through confusion, enlightenment, and the complication of class distinctions on her path to adulthood. Both James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield expertly use the literary elements of characterization to illustrate the journey of self-discovery while both main characters recognize that reality is not what they previously conceptualized it as.
James Joyce began his writing career in 1914 with a series of realistic stories published in a collection called The Dubliners. These short literary pieces are a glimpse into the ‘paralysis’ that those who lived in the turn of the century Ireland and its capital experienced at various points in life (Greenblatt, 2277). Two of the selections, “Araby” and “The Dead” are examples of Joyce’s ability to tell a story with precise details while remaining a detached third person narrator. “Araby” is centered on the main character experiencing an epiphany while “The Dead” is Joyce’s experiment with trying to remain objective. One might assume Joyce had trouble with objectivity when it concerned the setting of Ireland because Dublin would prove to be his only topic. According the editors of the Norton Anthology of Literature, “No writer has ever been more soaked in Dublin, its atmosphere, its history, its topography. He devised ways of expanding his account of the Irish capital, however, so that they became microcosms of human history, geography, and experience.” (Greenblatt, 2277) In both “Araby” and “The Dead” the climax reveals an epiphany of sorts that the main characters experience and each realize his actual position in life and its ultimate permanency.
I believe Araby employs many themes; the two most apparent to me are escape and fantasy though I see signs of religion and a boy's first love. Araby is an attempt by the boy to escape the bleak darkness of North Richmond Street. Joyce orchestrates an attempt to escape the "short days of winter", "where night falls early" and streetlights are but "feeble lanterns" failing miserably to light the somberness of the "dark muddy lanes"(Joyce 38). Metaphorically, Joyce calls the street blind, a dead end; much like Dublin itself in the mid 1890s when Joyce lived on North Richmond Street as a young boy. A recurrent theme of darkness weaves itself through the story; the boy hides in shadows from his uncle or to coyly catch a glimpse of his friend Mangan's sister who obliviously is his first love.
Although he had endured trials and tribulations to attend the bazaar, he soon finds that, exotic name withstanding, he is still in Dublin, is still impoverished, and his dreams of Araby were merely that, dreams. Our narrator remains a prisoner of his environment, his economic situation, and painful reality. North Richmond Street, the dead-end street described in the first sentence of “Araby” is more than a street. It is a symbol for the way that our protagonist views his life.