Dubliners

Dubliners is a sequence of fifteen short stories, all set in and around early twentieth-century Dublin, that Joyce arranged to move roughly through the stages of a life: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public or communal existence. The stories share no continuing characters, but they share a city, a mood, and a set of recurring concerns, so the collection reads as a single portrait assembled from many small lives.

The opening stories are narrated by a boy. In "The Sisters" he watches over a paralysed, dying priest and turns the word paralysis over in his mind; in "An Encounter" two truant schoolboys meet an unsettling stranger; in "Araby" a boy crosses the city to buy a gift for the girl he adores, reaches the closing bazaar too late, and sees his own romantic illusions collapse in the dark. Childhood here is already an education in disappointment.

The middle stories widen to young and middle-aged adults caught between desire and circumstance. Eveline stands at the dock, free to sail to a new life with her lover, and cannot make herself go. In "A Little Cloud" a meek clerk with private poetic dreams meets a brash friend who escaped to London, and returns home to shame and resentment over a crying child. Stories like "Two Gallants," "The Boarding House," "Counterparts," and "A Painful Case" trace meanness, entrapment, frustrated work, and a love refused until it is too late.

Later stories turn to public and institutional Dublin: politics in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," where men trade on the memory of Parnell; ambition and pettiness in "A Mother"; and religion handled as social machinery in "Grace." The tone throughout stays cool and exact. Joyce reports what people say and do, including their evasions and self-deceptions, and lets the gap between their words and their lives carry the judgment.

The book closes with "The Dead," its longest and richest story. At a holiday party, Gabriel Conroy moves through small social tensions until, that night, his wife is moved to tears by an old song and tells him of Michael Furey, a boy who loved her in her youth and died for her sake. Gabriel sees how shallow his own feeling has been, and the story ends with snow falling, in Joyce's words, faintly through the universe upon all the living and the dead, gathering the whole collection into one quiet, encompassing image.