Dubliners

There are fifteen stories collected in Dubliners, linked through a common longing for adventure and exotic locals (often symbolized in images of the east, which includes England and Europe, as well as Asia) set against the paralysis of the characters because of their naivety, their poverty, and their provincialism. Many critics have described the paralysis the characters exhibit and the pervading sense throughout the stories that they are living a life in death. Many of the characters look toward the east for their escape from Dublin, including Jimmy Doyle in “After the Race,” who is “too excited” being in the company of his European companions, who literally and metaphorically take him for a ride; the boy in “Araby,” who has adopted colonial attitudes of mystery and exotic eroticism around the East and imagines the bazaar “cast an eastern enchantment”; and the characters like Gallaher of “A Little Cloud” and Gabriel of “The Dead” who have adopted European manners; Molly Ivers calls Gabriel a “West Briton.” In Dublin, London is symbol of sophistication and progress. As Little Chandler walks toward his meeting with Gallaher, for example, we are told, “Every step brought him nearer to London, farther from his own inartistic life.” Yet in these stories, the east holds a trap: Jimmy Doyle’s significant loss during the card game, the disappointment of the bazaar, its darkness, commercialism and the distinctly English accents the boy hears once he arrives; the stuffed and pompous delusion that Gabriel recognizes in himself at the end of “The Dead.” Alternately, the west becomes a more likely, if more terrifying, route of for movement. Rather than the refinement and decadence of Europe or the mystery and exoticism of Asia, imagining toward the west represents a recognition of Ireland’s roots, represented by characters like Molly Ivers and Michael Furey in “The Dead,” Kathleen Kearny in “A Mother” and Frank in “Eveline.” 

Paradoxical to all this movement east and west, the characters of Dubliners are mostly stuck, Gabriel at the end of “The Dead” being the exception as he thinks of setting out on his journey west, which, however, is also the direction of the graveyard. With its the pervasive images of lifeless lives, as well as the collection’s opening image of Father Flynn’s death in “The Sisters” and the final image of Michael Furey’s ghost in “The Dead,” there is also throughout the stories a feeling of being haunted. Michael Furey in “The Dead” and Emily Sinico in “A Painful Case” are ghosts that possibly appear within these stories, but there are other senses of haunting, as Eveline’s mother’s words haunt the daughter’s life and keep her paralyzed within her constrained life, even as Eveline weekly wipes the dust that collects in the house, keeping the dead at bay but never ridding her life of its presence. The dead have an uncanny presence within the stories, existing on parallel planes with these characters who, whether from poverty or provincialism, cannot find a way to escape their paralysis.