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James Joyce's Dubliners: A Literary Analysis

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Like many important artistic works of the early twentieth century (the paintings of Joyce 's contemporary Wassily Kandinsky, for instance, or Louis Armstrong 's music), Dubliners appears deceptively simple and direct at first, especially compared with James Joyce 's later works of fiction: A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. It is certainly his most accessible book — relatively easy to comprehend and follow, whereas the others mentioned tend to challenge even the most sophisticated reader. It was in Dubliners that Joyce developed his storytelling muscles, honing the nuts-and-bolts craftsmanship that would make the high modern art of A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake viable. In Dubliners, he does not yet employ the techniques of mimetic narrative (characteristic of A Portrait) or stream-of-consciousness (Ulysses), but he paves the way here for those technical breakthroughs. Dubliners is somewhat comparable …show more content…

The other aspect that unites these disparate works of narrative prose is shared themes. Though the protagonist of "Araby" and that of "Clay" could hardly be more different with respect to age and temperament (the same goes for the main characters of "Eveline" and "The Dead"), all these stories are united by the ideas that the tales dramatize: paralysis, corruption, and death. In story after Dubliners story, characters fail to move forward, tending rather to forge outward and then retreat, or else circle endlessly. They are stuck in place. Examples of corruption — that is, contamination, deterioration, perversity, and depravity — occur throughout. Finally, Dubliners begins with a death and ends with a death (in a story titled, logically enough, "The Dead"), with numerous deaths either dramatized or referred to in

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