The main features of James Joyce’s work

Writer’s creative method : My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard. (Letters, I.134)
A number of times Joyce made clear his intention of presenting “Dublin to the world” (see Letters, II.122) at least as he conceived the city and its inhabitants. He did so in a direct, unadorned, realistic style that included unvarnished descriptive elements and commonplace diction. However, these elements that he saw as essential to conveying the gritty essence of his narrative vision proved to be obstacles to publication, as publishers feared that the realistic evocation of the city would give offense to the merchants whose businesses were named and the readers whose coarse everyday language was captured on the page. At the same time, as Joyce well knew, it is this attention to detail, the ordering of the stories according to the stages of human maturation, the pervasive theme of paralysis, manifest in multiple variations like entrapment, disillusionment, and death, and the stories’ common setting that give the collection coherence and provide a comprehensive and lifelike portrait of Dublin and its citizens. It would be a mistake, however, to read the collection as a vindictive assault upon the city in which Joyce grew to manhood. His significant use of the word moral also throws light on what he meant by “a style of scrupulous meanness.” It does not primarily signify ethical judgment or valuation; rather, derived from the Latin moralis, the word means the custom or behavior of a people, and Joyce is portraying the customs, behavior, and thoughts of the citizens of Dublin. In effect, he feels that by conveying a realistic impression of his city, readers of Dubliners will come to their own conclusions regarding its citizens.
That is not to say that the narratives shy away from harsh representations. Rather, Joyce endeavors to capture as accurately as possible the atmosphere that he felt made life in the city so difficult for its inhabitants. The oppressive effects of religious, political, cultural, and economic forces on the lives of lower-middle-class Dubliners provided Joyce the raw material for a piercingly objective, psychologically realistic picture of Dubliners as an afflicted people. The arrangement of the stories and the use of imagery and symbolism peculiar to each and to its place within the whole sharpen the variations on Joyce’s central theme of a stultified city. “I call the series Dubliners,” Joyce wrote in August 1904 to his former classmate Constantine Curran, “to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city” (Letters, I.55). In the opening lines of “The Sisters,” paralysis confronts the reader as the collection’s initial and dominant theme. It emerges as more complex than simple inertia, evoking both stasis and an underlying sense of despair, a combination of resignation and loss that emerges throughout the collection.
The psychological, spiritual, and emotional ambiances of the collection evolve slowly, along carefully delineated lines paralleling human growth and development. As early as 1905, Joyce had established a fourfold division of three stories each for Dubliners. Although this structure changed somewhat as the number of stories grew, its basic design remained intact. In the first maturational division of Dubliners, childhood, there are three stories: “The Sisters” (written in 1904 and first published that same year in the Iish Homestead under Joyce’s pseudonym, Stephen Daedalus), “An Encounter,” and “Araby” (both written in 1905). The second division, adolescence, includes four stories: “Eveline” and “After the Race” (both composed in 1904 and first published in that year in the Irish Homestead under the name of Stephen Daedelus), “Two Gallants” (written in 1905–06), and “The Boarding House” (written in 1905). The third group, adulthood, consists of four stories: “A Little Cloud” (composed in 1906), “Counterparts” (written at the same time as “The Boarding House” in 1905), “Clay” (composed in 1905–06), and “A Painful Case” (written in 1905). The fourth and last division, public life, consists of “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” “A Mother,” “Grace” (all written in 1905), and “The Dead” (written in 1906–07).
In her essay “The Life Chronology of Dubliners,” Florence L. Walzl has examined the reasoning that motivated Joyce to order the stories in progressive stages corresponding to the stages of human life. According to Walzl, Joyce employed the terms childhood, adolescence, and maturity in ways that parallel the Roman division of life rather than the division commonly identified with these concepts. “Joyce had a strong awareness,” Walzl argues, “of the Roman divisions of the life span. His statements and practices indicate that he adopted the view that childhood (pueritia) extended to age seventeen; adolescence (adulescentia) from seventeen through the thirtieth year; young manhood (juventus) from thirty-one to forty-five, and old age (senectus) from forty-five on.” Joyce’s concern for chronology and age distinction reveals the general importance for him of order in his art, and it also touches on his sense of the fluctuating forms of identity through which we pass as we slowly mature.
Despite the significance of context for the cohesion of the collection, stylistic expression is as important to Joyce as thematic development. His concern with and careful attention to word order and overall structure began with Chamber Music, a work completed prior to Dubliners, and it remains a central element in his compositional strategy throughout his oeuvre. Indeed, as his thematic endeavors became more complex and diffuse, stylistics functions as the primary means by which Joyce achieves coherence in and among all of his writings. Although some of Joyce’s methods in the short stories may seem understated when compared with the formal experimentation that he undertook in subsequent prose fiction—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake—time and again passages in Dubliners wonderfully adumbrate fully developed techniques that characterize the later work. Indeed, realizing the stylistic and thematic virtuosity of the short stories stands as the first step to full comprehension of their significance.
In “Araby,” for example, religious iconography counterpoints the basic narrative thread, making both ironic and straightforward commentary on the quest of the young narrator. In “An Encounter,” “Two Gallants,” and “Counterparts,” detailed representations of Dublin geography enforce the claustrophobic atmosphere of each story. In “A Mother,” “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” and “The Dead,” Dublin’s social mores reflect not only universal human concerns but the very precise ways in which they are played out in Joyce’s city. Perhaps most significantly, throughout the collection a series of rich literary, theological, philosophical, and cultural allusions bring a variety of perspectives and possible meanings to the text, and they test a reader’s ability to comprehend and unify the diverse associations.
While readers rightly see Dubliners as marking an early stage in Joyce’s creative development, one needs to avoid a simplistic sense of what that means. One can certainly trace a growing artistic sophistication over the course of Joyce’s fiction writing. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake each manifests abilities not evident in the works that preceded it. Nonetheless, as early as Dubliners one can find the fundamental artistic elements that will characterize Joyce’s writing over the course of his career as an author. Furthermore, it is important to remember that these stories were created during a time of economic trial, emotional upheaval, and cultural disorientation. Joyce, Nora, and his growing family were struggling to adjust to a radically different environment from life in Dublin, and evidence of those trials, while not explicit, is certainly embedded in his short stories
INDIVIDUAL STORIES