Dubliners

Dubliners Review

James Joyce was twenty-five when he began writing Dubliners and thirty-two when it was finally published, after years of rejections and legal threats from publishers who feared its candour about Irish Catholic society. The delay matters: the book that eventually appeared had been refined by years of frustration into something harder and cleaner than most first collections ever become. It is, among other things, proof that difficulty of publication is not always bad for literature.

The fifteen stories are arranged according to Joyce’s own design — childhood, adolescence, maturity, public life, and finally death — and together they build a portrait of a city in the grip of what Joyce called “paralysis.” His Dubliners cannot leave, cannot change, cannot fully live. They are held in place by the Church, by nationalism, by family obligation, by their own habits of mind. The great subject of the collection is not any individual story but the aggregate pressure of these forces on ordinary people who mostly cannot articulate, let alone resist, what is happening to them.

The craft on display is remarkable, particularly for a young writer. The famous technique of the epiphany — a moment in which the meaning of a situation suddenly becomes legible, often through a trivial detail — is present in nearly every story, but Joyce varies it so skillfully that it never becomes formulaic. “Araby,” one of the finest stories of adolescent disillusionment in the language, turns on a single overheard conversation. “Counterparts” builds a portrait of casual domestic violence through an afternoon’s drudgery and drinking. “The Dead” — the story that closes the collection and which Joyce wrote last — is in a different register entirely: longer, more expansive, more direct about what it is doing, and finally more devastating.

Gabriel Conroy’s recognition at the end of “The Dead” — that his wife carries a love he has never known about, that he has never truly known her, that the dead may be more alive than the living — is one of the great epiphanies in fiction. The closing image, snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling on all the living and the dead, is the most famous passage Joyce ever wrote outside of Ulysses, and it earns every word of its reputation. Dubliners entered the public domain decades ago, and it remains, in the judgment of many readers, the best short story collection in the English language.

The Architecture of a City

What distinguishes Dubliners from most first collections is that it is genuinely a book rather than an assortment. Joyce arranged the fifteen stories to move through stages of life — childhood, adolescence, maturity, public life, and finally death — so that the collection builds a cumulative portrait of a single city held in what he called “paralysis.” His Dubliners cannot leave, cannot change, cannot fully live; they are pinned in place by the Church, by nationalism, by family obligation, and by their own ingrained habits of mind. No individual story carries this theme alone. It emerges from the aggregate, from the pressure of these forces felt across a whole society of people who mostly cannot name, let alone resist, what is happening to them.

The Epiphany as Method

Joyce’s signature device — the epiphany, in which the meaning of a situation suddenly becomes legible, often through a trivial detail — is present in nearly every story, and his control of it is remarkable for a writer in his twenties. He varies it so skilfully that it never hardens into formula. In “Araby,” one of the finest accounts of adolescent disillusionment in the language, the revelation turns on a single overheard scrap of conversation in an emptying bazaar. In “Counterparts,” a portrait of casual domestic violence is built through the slow accretion of an afternoon’s drudgery and drink. Each story withholds its meaning until a final moment when the whole arrangement clicks into focus, and Joyce trusts the reader to feel the click rather than having it explained.

The Prose

The collection’s prose is its quiet miracle. Joyce had not yet developed the formal pyrotechnics of Ulysses; here the style is plain on the surface and extraordinarily precise underneath, every word doing work, nothing padded or wasted. This restraint is itself an artistic position — the paralysis of his subjects is mirrored in a prose that refuses to dramatise or console. The book’s history bears on its quality, too: rejected for years and threatened with legal action by publishers who feared its candour about Irish Catholic society, Dubliners was refined by a decade of frustration into something harder and cleaner than most early collections ever achieve.

”The Dead”

The collection culminates in “The Dead,” written last and in a register entirely its own — longer, more expansive, more openly emotional than anything preceding it. Gabriel Conroy’s recognition at a Christmas party that his wife carries a buried love he has never known about, that he has never truly known her, that the dead may be more vividly alive than the living, is among the supreme epiphanies in all of fiction. The closing image — snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling upon all the living and the dead — is the most famous passage Joyce wrote outside Ulysses, and it earns every word of its reputation. “The Dead” alone would justify the book; that it sits at the end of fourteen other near-perfect stories is what makes Dubliners, in the judgment of many readers, the finest short-story collection in the English language.