Literary Analysis: Clay and The Dead
In the fifteen Dubliners stories, city life, religion, friends and family bring hope to individuals discovering what it means to be human. Two stories stood out in James Joyce’s Dubliners. One story attempts to mislead readers as it is hard to follow and the other story is the most famous story in the book. In the stories “Clay” and “The Dead,” James Joyce uses escape themes to deal with the emotions of the characters, Maria and Gabriel living in the Dublin society. Both stories take place during the winter on Halloween and Christmas, which are the holiday seasons and the season of death.
In “Clay,” the main character, Maria is a patient, old woman and a former maid for rival brothers Joe and Alphy Donnelly. Now that they’re all grown up, she seems to be “lost” in her life, childless and unmarried, and is now an employee at a Laundromat. Maria has struggled for what seems like most of her life both financially and socially. Maria lives on a small but independent income from a job that earns her the respect of co-workers and bosses. Glimpses of poverty are seen in this story when Maria becomes concerned that she lost the cake that she bought for the Donnelly family. “Maria said she had brought something special for papa and mamma, something they would be sure to like, and she began to look for her plumcake” (99). Maria’s loss of the cake is painful because she paid a big price for it. Maria was trying to treat her loved ones despite her limited income.
Although Gabriel from “The Dead” isn’t poor like Maria, he isn’t very wealthy either unlike his aunts. Gabriel is just an average writer. He doesn’t hold annual parties like his aunts do every year to make him seem snobbish to others. J...
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Langbaum, Robert “The Epiphanic Mode in Wordsworth and Modern Literature.” New Literary History Vol. 14 (1983): 335-358. JSTOR. University of Dayton, Roesch Library. 18 February 2004
One of the biggest and longest lasting environmental impacts of the detonation of the atomic bomb is the radiation contaminations that are left over. These contaminations spread into water, air, animals, soil and into the atmosphere. What’s worse is that these contaminations have materials that have very long half-life meaning that their radiation effects do not decay quickly. “Many of the substances released, including plutonium, uranium, strontium, cesium, benzene, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), mercury and cyanide, are carcinogenic and/or mutagenic and remain hazardous for thousands, some for hundreds of thousands, of year” (The Effects of nuclear weapons). The spread of these contaminates will cause significant health risks to animals ca...
Looking for peace and quiet to write his novel, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) becomes the winter caretaker of Colorado’s desolate Overlook Hotel. Despite learning about the previous caretaker’s descent to madness, and the slaughtering of his family, Jack decides to bring along his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and his son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), to keep him company during the stay. But shortly after acclimating to life in the Overlook Hotel, the family’s sanity begins to deteriorate. Danny begins to use “The Shining,” a telepathic ability that allows him to read minds and experience premonitions, and Jack starts to succumb to cabin-fever, growing more and more aggressive as time goes on. Finally, when the previous caretaker confronts Jack, things take a turn for the worst, and the only force that can save Danny and Wendy is “The Shining.”
Stillinger, Jack, Deidre Lynch, Stephen Greenblatt, and M H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume D. New York, N.Y: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006. Print.
"One day he caught a fish, a beautiful big big fish, and the man in the hotel boiled it for their dinner" (p.191). Little did Mrs. Malins know that those words issued from her feeble old lips so poignantly described the insensibility of the characters in James Joyce's The Dead toward their barren lives. The people portrayed in this novelette represented a wealthy Irish class in the early twentieth century, gathered at the house of the Morkan sisters for an annual tradition of feast and dance. Although all of the personages had, at one point, a potential for a beautiful life, sad memories of the past and the despair that invaded Ireland had eventually boiled all true senses and desires into a dull stew, destined to rot. Of particular interest is Gabriel Conroy, whom Joyce singularly bestowed a gift of introspection, though that did not save him from becoming yet another of the living dead.
The nature of time and history in The Shining is left wholly ambiguous, often disrupted both in the contents of the movie itself and its manner of framing. The movie is framed in different segments, a black scene interrupting the story by marking off time. It starts by counting through months (“September”) to hours (“Two Hours”), thus disrupting and distorting the passage of time for the viewer (“Remembrance of Things Forgotten” 208-209). The history of the hotel provides the supernatural elements. Dick Hallorann, the head chef of the Overlook, explains the Shining (Supernatural visions and elements of the hotel) that way: “When something happens, it leaves a trace of itself behind.” (The Shining 33:00). The specific visions of the past primarily consist of the daughters murdered by an earlier caretaker, a dead woman in the bathtub of Room 237, and the 1920s party that Jack stumbles upon. It’s at the party that Jack meets the murderous earlier caretaker himself, a man named Delbert Grady. He is another anachronism in the party, a man who during the hotel in the winter month and couldn't go to the party,
The scene with Lily (p.2009) in the very beginning of the story shows us already quite a lot about Gabriel: He appears good-humoured, talkative and behaves very kind to her. In this situation we find one of his many character traits: Gabriel is presented to us as a quite talkative, decent and cheerful 'small talk partner'. This aspect of his character, that accompanies us on many pages, is quite strong. Some scenes, three of them are mentioned here, can be uncovered as good examples of his kind way to spread a cheerful atmosphere: "He felt quite at ease now for he was an expert carver and liked nothing better than to find himself at the head of a well-laden table." (p.2020) This description of his attitude at the dinner table shows us very good that Gabriel is able to entertain p...
...ze and hotel were a maze for Jack, Wendy, and Danny. It will always be a wild journey in and out, and “The Shining” will always provide something new to mystify viewers. The movie will not quell the fears that Kubrick pulled out of the audience, but viewers are left to ponder and reflect on their meaning. And the Overlook Hotel is an embodiment of immortality and all the fears and unknowns associated with it.
At first glance many similarities between Christianity and Greek mythology can not be seen , however , after closer examination you can see many similarities. Strongly influenced by two different cultures for two completely different periods , each "religion" retains similarities to each other , due in part to its origins. These two religions originated in the geographical area of Eastern Europe, with Christianity gaining popularity at the expense of Greek ( and Roman ) mythology.
Many people today have read Stephen King’s horror novel The Shining and enjoyed his use of literary devices, but what about the techniques that transferred into Stanley Kubrick’s film? First, The Shining is about an already dysfunctional family, that move into a hotel because the father, Jack Torrence, has gotten a job as the caretaker of the hotel. Before taking the job, Jack is informed that the previous caretaker got “cabin fever” and killed his entire family. His son, Danny Torrence, is psychic and telepathic and begins to see and be bothered by the spirits living in the hotel. These spirits eventually possess Jack and he too tries to kill his family, which also includes his wife, Wendy Torrence.
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’
Kumar, Udaya. The Joycean Labyrinth: Repetition, Time, and Tradition in Ulysses. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1991.
Givens, Seon, ed. James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism. New York: 1948. 2nd ed. 1963.
In “The Dead,” James Joyce presents the Irish as a people so overwhelmed with times past and people gone that they cannot count themselves among the living. Rather, their preoccupation with the past and lack of faith in the present ensures that they are more dead than they are alive. The story, which takes place at a holiday party, explores the paralyzed condition of the lifeless revelers in relation to the political and cultural stagnation of Ireland. Gabriel Conroy, the story’s main character, differs from his countrymen in that he recognizes the hold that the past has on Irish nationalists and tries to free himself from this living death by shedding his Gaelic roots and embracing Anglican thinking. However, he is not able to escape, and thus Joyce creates a juxtaposition between old and new, dead and alive, and Irish and Anglican within Gabriel. His struggle, as well as the broader struggle within Irish society of accommodating inevitable English influence with traditional Gaelic customs is perpetuated by symbols of snow and shadow, Gabriel’s relationship with his wife, and the epiphany that allows him to rise above it all in a profound and poignant dissertation on Ireland in the time of England.
James Joyce emerged as a radical new narrative writer in modern times. Joyce conveyed this new writing style through his stylistic devices such as the stream of consciousness, and a complex set of mythic parallels and literary parodies. This mythic parallel is called an epiphany. “The Dead” by Joyce was written as a part of Joyce’s collection called “The Dubliners”. Joyce’s influence behind writing the short story was all around him. The growing nationalist Irish movement around Dublin, Ireland greatly influences Joyce’s inspiration for writing “The Dubliners”. Joyce attempted to create an original portrayal of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. The historical context for Joyce’s written work was the tense times before the Irish-English civil war broke out. An examination of his writing style reveals his significance as a modern writer.