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Dubliners

James Joyce

Book Overview: 

Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce. They were meant to be a naturalistic depiction of the Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.

The stories were written at the time when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by various converging ideas and influences. They center on Joyce's idea of an epiphany: a moment where a character has a special moment of self-understanding or illumination. Many of the characters in Dubliners later appear in minor roles in Joyce's novel Ulysses.The initial stories in the collection are narrated by children as protagonists, and as the stories continue, they deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people. This is in line with Joyce's tripartite division of the collection into childhood, adolescence and maturity.

In, The Dead, a group of Dubliners gather together for a Christmas celebration in James Joyce’s transcendent tale of the mundanity and magic in life and death.

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Book Excerpt: 
. . .His head was large, globular and oily; it sweated in all weathers; and his large round hat, set upon it sideways, looked like a bulb which had grown out of another. He always stared straight before him as if he were on parade and, when he wished to gaze after someone in the street, it was necessary for him to move his body from the hips. At present he was about town. Whenever any job was vacant a friend was always ready to give him the hard word. He was often to be seen walking with policemen in plain clothes, talking earnestly. He knew the inner side of all affairs and was fond of delivering final judgments. He spoke without listening to the speech of his companions. His conversation was mainly about himself what he had said to such a person and what such a person had said to him and what he had said to settle the matter. When he reported these dialogues he aspirated the first letter of his name after the manner of Florentines.

Lenehan offered his friend a ci. . . Read More

Community Reviews

Childhood… Old age… Ages in between… Coming of age… Dying…
“Oh, quite peacefully, ma’am, said Eliza. You couldn’t tell when the breath went out of him. He had a beautiful death, God be praised.”
The first amorous admiration from afar…
I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever

Dubliners is a collection of short stories published in 1914. The concluding story is The Dead, which the blurb on GR cites as “the best short story ever written.”

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 fl

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, disorien

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, n

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