“There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin”--Joyce "Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.” Dubliners is,...

Life is full of missed opportunities and hard decisions. Sometimes it’s difficult to know what to actually do. Dubliners creates an image of an ever movie city, of an ever moving exchange of people who experience the reality of life. And that’s the whole point: realism. Not everything goes well, not everything is perfectly constructed. Life is random and unpredictable. If we’re not careful it may escape from us entirely. There are two types of stories in Dubliners. The first, and by far the m...

Dubliners, James Joyce In his stories, Joyce combines heterogeneous elements. Poetic mysticism is expressed in a naturalistic way. They pay attention to sound and melody for illustration. In their works, they always use humor and irony and references to myths and holy books. If the reader can grasp all these mysteries, he will be glad that he may not be able to read any other work. Joyce is a language engineer before he became a writer. Joyce's particular view of language, and the word, as the c...

(Edited for typos, pictures added 11/15/2021)Dubliners is a collection of short stories published in 1914. The concluding story is “The Dead,” which has been cited as “the best short story ever written.” You can see that on GR’s entry for the story. We are told in a brief introduction that Joyce was a pioneer in popularizing the structure of the modern short story as focused on “a fleeting but decisive episode.” Elsewhere I’ve read of the focus of the modern short story described as “the moment....

Was James Joyce the greatest English language writer in modern times? I don’t know, maybe, but Dubliners helps to make his case. Brilliant in it’s subtle, realistic way. Fifteen stories that paint a portrait of Dublin at the turn of last century. "The Dead" is the final story and the most poignant and powerful but several stand out as exceptional, and they are all good. “Counterparts” is a disturbing close up look at the old drunken Irish family stereotype that fails to be humorous. “A Mother” t...

In The Dead, the last story in this collection, Gabriel Conroy recounts an anecdote about his grandfather and his horse, Johnny, who used to walk in circles to drive the grinding stone in a mill. One day, the grandfather harnessed the horse and took him out to a military review. But Johnny, disoriented as he passed by a statue of William III, started circling the monument stubbornly as if he were back at the mill. This little tale within a tale encapsulates perfectly the spirit and essence of Jo...

Before embarking towards my maiden Joyce read, I prepared myself to pour in as much effort required on my part to understand Dubliners. I didn’t assume them to be incomprehensible or distant, but an anxiety akin to meeting a known stranger for the first time was definitely present. The said anxiety shortly materialized into a much-awaited prospect after reading the opening story and finally transformed into a confident and gentle companion who led me through the sepia streets of an unassuming ci...

I was put off by reading James Joyce because I was scared of reading him — that I wouldn’t understand a damn thing he said although I knew he was a brilliant writer…one for the ages. I think it was ‘Ulysses’ that scared me off, and I made a massive generalization (if I don’t understand that book, I won’t understand anything by Joyce). My mistake. I remember a Goodreads friend recommended I read it, because I think I or they had read a short story collection (whose author escapes me right now), a...

(*)This is a collection of short stories. Or are they one single long story? “A Portrait of the City as an Old and Stultifying Enclave.”?This story fashions a kaleidoscopic vision of Dublin in the early 1900s. This is a city enclosed in a gray cylinder that a hand turns periodically and new scenes are conjured up for the contemplation of a single (male) eye. The same components reappear, falling in different places playing different relationships with each other; some others disappear forever o...

Another book from my project (quite successful until now) to read more classics. When I was in college and Uni I was all about contemporary literature (Marquez, Reverte, Murakami) and I missed many of the "must read" authors. I am trying to redeem myself now. I chose the Dubliners because I knew I would never have the will and patience to finish Ulysses. I have to admit that although I understand the value of the volume and its structure, I did not like it. It bore me terribly. I fell asleep whi...

James Joyce once said; "If Dublin suddenly disappeared from the Earth it could be reconstructed out of my book Ulysses". I have never been to Dublin so I have no idea what it's like today, but through Joyce's writings I have a sense of what it was like in the early 20th century. It’s not so much that he describes the physical city, but his descriptions of its establishments, its social and political atmosphere, and especially its people, is so detailed and complete that the physical picture just...

My first Joyce. The right choice. A collection of stories that some may describe as beautiful, others as boring, maybe even brilliant, but that I want to describe as “apt”. Dublin is richer, I am sure, due to the fact that it has Dubliners to represent it. From the first story, The Sisters, to the last, The Dead, each story is apt – it is perfectly appropriate, perfectly suitable and fitting for the occasion which it describes. Not a word is out of place. No character does or says anything that

As powerful a commitment to the form to be found in English. The original fourteen stories should be read as a set piece: as they portray the evolution of thought from childhood to adulthood: from dogmatic belief to reasoned denial. The Dead should be viewed separately. Five-stars!

This is my first reading of Joyce’s “Dubliners.” I know, shocking, everyone else read it in high school or collegiate undergraduate literature courses and were forced to author papers on Joyce’s themes and symbolism. I read it for pleasure and for background on a project I’m working on. It’s considered one of Joyce’s more accessible works, certainly when compared with “Ulysses” which has a reputation for everyone claiming to have read it, but no one actually does. Anyways, I did find it readable...

For anyone thinking of putting James Joyce on your “must read this year” list for 2019 here are my suggestions.BY1. DublinersBrilliantly atmospheric scraps of Irish miserablism – must read to get where JJ is coming from. 2. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManStrangely – tiresome and inessential. Bangs on about religion and more Irish miserablism and a bit too much like a portrait of the author as an insufferable young genius. 3. UlyssesThe essential book out of all of these. Difficult but al...

Why do we wish to live this life; life, which at times seem to accompany the vague impressions we have long since been comfortable to carry along; the ideas, the choices, which have become a second nature to us. How many times do we stop and think about them? Particularly, as readers, as the ones who have been challenged, and hence in a way made aware by written word; how many times do we stop and think - life cannot always be a search, it cannot always be a constant exploration into unknown, a

Was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin .The stories that make up Dubliners open with death and death ends it as well. And somewhere in between there is a life. The first truancy, the first timid amorous sighs and all shades of greyness, whole stretches of the usual humdrum reality. People caught up in the daily routine, whom life was withheld. The workers, petty crooks and freeloaders, seamstresses, scullery maids, servants, scriven

Best known for his obscure Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, James Joyce is also the author of this collection of short stories interested in Dubliners. It would be difficult to speak of enhancement since Joyce does not idealize his compatriots. In a rich and neat language, Joyce describes the Irish capital at the beginning of the 20th century through stories plunging into a rampant and above all bourgeois daily life.From schoolchildren who left to skip school to supporters of Charles Parnell, the her...

''Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swo

review update – 5/15/17The first twelve stories of Dubliners were submitted to a publisher in 1905, when Joyce was 22. They were accepted, but squeamishness on the publisher’s part kept delaying publication. Over the next three years Joyce submitted three additional stories. Finally he took the collection to a second publisher. Again it was accepted, and again it was held back. Finally, in 1914, the original publisher overcame his fears and released the volume to the public. By now, however, Joy...