James Joyce

and Dubliners Performer Heritage

Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,
Margaret Layton © 2017
 James Joyce and Dubliners

1. Life

• 1882: born in Dublin, the eldest

surviving child of ten children.

• 1888-1898: largely educated by

the Jesuits, first at Clongowes
Wood College and later Belvedere
College.

• 1899: studied Modern Languages

at University College, Dublin.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

1. Life
• Grew up as a rebel among rebels.

• In contrast with Yeats and the

other literary contemporaries
who tried to rediscover the
Irish Celtic identity.

• His interest was for a broader

European culture, and this led him to
begin to think of himself as a
European rather than an Irishman.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

1. Life
• 1902: he received a Bachelor Degree
with a focus on modern languages.

• 1903: he left Ireland to attend a

medical school in Paris.

• His mother’s fatal illness brought him

back to Dublin. In June 1904 he met
and fell in love with Nora Barnacle,
a twenty-year-old girl who was
working as a chambermaid in a hotel.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

1. Life
• 1905: settled in Trieste with
Nora Barnacle, whom he
eventually married. Here he
made friends with Italo Svevo.

• 1905-1907: His two children,

Giorgio and Lucia, were born.

• 1914: Dubliners was

completed in 1905 but only
published on the eve of the
First World War.
Nora Barnacle and the two children Giorgio and Lucia.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

1. Life
• 1915: Joyce moved to Zurich
together with his family, since his
position as a British national in
Austrian-occupied Trieste left him
no alternative.
• 1916: A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man, his semi-
autobiographical novel, was
published.
• 1917: received the first of several
anonymous donations. Paris, 1924. The Joyce Family: James, Lucia,
Giorgio, Nora.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

1. Life
• 1918: Ulysses began to appear in
serial form in The Little Review.

• 1920: moved to Paris.

• 1922: the American-born

bookseller Sylvia Beach agreed to
publish Ulysses. This novel drew
both praise and sharp criticism.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

1. Life
• 1939: Finnegans Wake was
published.

• 1940: the Joyces returned to

Zurich, the city that had first given
them refuge during World War I.

• 1941: Joyce never saw the

conclusion of World War II.
Following an intestinal operation,
he died at the age of 59. He is
buried in Zurich.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

2. The most important

features of Joyce’s works
• The setting of most of
his works  Ireland,
especially Dublin.

• He rebelled against
the Catholic Church.

• All the facts in his Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century.

narratives  explored
from different points of view simultaneously.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

2. The most important

features of Joyce’s works
Greater importance given to the inner world of the
characters.

Time  perceived as subjective.

His task  to render life objectively.

Isolation and detachment of the

artist from society.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

3. The evolution of Joyce’s style

• Realism.
• Disciplined prose.
• Different points of view.
• Free-direct speech.

Dubliners (1914)

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

3. The evolution of Joyce’s style

• Third-person narration.
• Minimal dialogue.
• Language and prose used
to portray the protagonist’s
state of mind.
• Free-direct speech.

A Portrait of the Artist as

a Young Man (1916)

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

3. The evolution of Joyce’s style

• Interior monologue with

two levels of narration.

• Extreme interior
monologue.

Ulysses (1922)

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

4. Dublin
• The Dublin represented by Joyce is not fixed and
static, it is ‘the revolutionary montage of “Dublins”
through a range of historical juxtapositions and varied
styles’.

• The 15 stories of the

Dubliners, though set
in the same city, are
not united by their
geography: each
story has a singular
location.
Dublin.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

4. Dublin
• The evocation of his town in A Portrait of the Artist is
deeply influenced by Joyce’s prolonged temporal and
spatial distance; Dublin is filtered through Stephen’s
mind.

• In Ulysses, Dublin overwhelms the reader.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

5. Dubliners
• Published in 1914 in the newspaper The Irish Homestead
by Joyce with the pseudonym Stephen Dedalus.

• Dubliners are described as afflicted people.

• All the stories are

set in Dublin 
‘The city seemed
to me the centre
of paralysis’,
Joyce stated.
Nassau Street, Dublin,
early 20th century.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

5. Dubliners: structure and style

Eveline A Little Cloud Ivy Day in the
The Sisters Committee Room
After the Race Counterparts
An Encounter A Mother
Two Gallants Clay
Araby Grace
The Boarding A Painful Case
House The Dead
Childhood Adolescence Mature life Public life

DUBLIN
Paralysis / Escape

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

5. Dubliners: narrative
technique and themes
• Naturalistic, concise, detailed descriptions.

• Realism mixed with symbolism  deeper meaning of

external details.

• Each story opens in medias res and is mostly told from

the perspective of a character.

• Use of free-direct speech and free-direct thought 

direct presentation of the character’s thoughts.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

5. Dubliners: narrative
technique and themes
• Different linguistic registers  the language suits
the age, the social class and the role of the characters.

• Use of epiphany  ‘the sudden spiritual manifestation’

of an interior reality.

• Themes  paralysis and escape.

• Absence of a didactic and moral aim because

of the impersonality of the artist.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

5. Dubliners: epiphany
Joyce’s aim  to take the reader beyond the usual aspects
of life through epiphany.

It is the special moment in Understanding the

which a trivial gesture, an epiphany in each
external object or a banal story is the key to
situation or an episode lead the the story itself.
character to a sudden self-
realisation about himself /
herself or about the reality
surrounding him / her.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

5. Dubliners: paralysis
The main theme of Dubliners  paralysis.

Physical
paralysis
caused by
external forces.

Moral paralysis
linked to religion,
politics and
culture.
W. F. Osborne, In a Dublin Park, Light and Shade, c. 1895,. Dublin,
National Gallery of Ireland.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

5. Dubliners: paralysis
• The climax of the stories  the coming to awareness by
the characters of their own paralysis.

J. B. Yeats, In the Tram, 1923,

Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland.

• Alternative to paralysis  escape which always leads

to failure.
Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

5. Dubliners: Eveline
CHARACTERS

• Eveline  passive, influenced by her family’s mentality.

• Her father  a violent and strict man  her fear.
• Her mother  conservative  her duty.
• Frank  Eveline’s fiancé, a very kind, open-hearted and
brave boy  her unknown future.
• Antithesis between Eveline’s house and her new one in
Buenos Aires Paralysis / Escape.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

5. Dubliners: Eveline
STRUCTURE AND STYLE

• The story opens in medias res  ‘She sat at the window

watching the evening invade the avenue.’

• Third-person narrator but

Eveline’s point of view.

• Subjective perception of time.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

5. Dubliners: Eveline
STRUCTURE AND STYLE

• Epiphany  a street organ which reminds Eveline of the

promise she made to her dying mother.

• Symbolic words  dust = decay, paralysis

sea = action, escape

Themes 
• struggle between one’s happiness and one’s
responsibility;
• dream vs reality;
• action and inactivity;
• paralysis and the failure to find a way out of it.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

5. The Dubliners: The Dead

THE IMAGERY  a series of symbolic antithesis:
living dead
light darkness
warmth cold
present past

SYMBOLS 
the snow = a change in Gabriel, a desire to change.
the falling snow = heaven or death reached by people
at the end of their life.
Gabriel’s journey to the west = better to pass boldly into that
other world, in the full glory of some passion,
than fade and wither with age.

Performer Heritage
 James Joyce and Dubliners

5. Dubliners: The Dead

The protagonists: Gabriel Conroy, an embodiment of Joyce
himself, and Gretta, his wife.

Gabriel’s marriage is clearly suffering from paralysis.

Epiphany  the song The Lass of Aughrim, reminds Gretta

of a young man, Michael Furey, who died for her when he
was seventeen years old.  Gabriel understands he is
deader than Michael Furey in Gretta’s mind.

Anjelica Huston and Donal McCann

in John Huston’s The Dead (1987).

Performer Heritage