Dubliners

by James Joyce

List of Stories

Critical Guides:

Notes by Bob Williams

Tindall: Reader's Guide to James Joyce

Joyce A to Z

Critical Essays edited by Clive Hart

Dubliners is a set of short stories by Joyce and his earliest work. The stories are a natural place to start for the Joycean reader and as the title suggest, set in Dublin at the turn of the 20th Century. Joyce works are all set in Dublin, even though Joyce was living in various cities in Europe.

Why did he write these stories?

In a letter to Grant Richards (publisher of Dubliners) written in May 1906, Joyce clearly stated his overall purpose and design in writing the stories:

My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indiferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the convition that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard. - Letters II. 134

To present "Dublin to the world" was Joyce's intent (see Letters II.122) and he did so in a direct, unadorned realistic style that included unvarnished descriptive elements and commonplace diction, all of which proved to be obstacles to publication. Joyce's attention to detail, the chronological ordering of the stories, the pervasive theme of paralysis in multiple variations (entrapment, disillusionment, death) and the stories' common setting give the collection coherence and provide a comprehensive and lifelike portrait of Dublin and its citizens.

I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiphlegia or paralysis which many consider a city" (Letters I.55).

Letter to former classmate, Constantine Curran (1904)