Agnieszka's Reviews > Dubliners

Was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin .

The stories that make up Dubliners open with death and death ends it as well. And somewhere in between there is a life. The first truancy, the first timid amorous sighs and all shades of greyness, whole stretches of the usual humdrum reality. People caught up in the daily routine, whom life was withheld.

The workers, petty crooks and freeloaders, seamstresses, scullery maids, servants, scriveners, salesmen, union activists - the whole cross-section of Irish middle and lower-middle class. Some of them crave for money, some for other places, some for love while others for another times. And the more they’re yearning the bigger is their disillusionment and discontent. Outcasts from life’s feast.

Boy from Araby , enamoured of friend’s sister wants to visit a charity bazaar and buy something for the girl to find finally the bazaar closed, hero of Counterparts having pawned his watch, wants only to drink himself up but ends up with empty pockets and does not even feel drunk or Chandler, hero of A little cloud who’s eagerly awaiting his old friend to find him only vulgar and patronizing. People unfulfilled, for whom an intemperance is something as inevitable as climate changes, who take out all their failures, pathetic fate and frustration on children and weaker than themselves. Who feel that if they want to achieve anything in life they have to leave this town behind, that in Dublin actually there is no life.

And so Joyce did. But no matter how much had he abandoned Dublin, after all he took this city with himself forever. He loved and hated it, became a bard of Dublin and its inhabitants, a great admirer but its stern critic at the same time. The same sentiments had he for his homeland, often in his works called Errorland .

The main theme of Dubliners that ties together all stories is the breakdown of all values, embodied in drunkenness, decadent debauchery, obscurantism of clergy, hypocrisy, intellectual primitivism of bourgeoisie, and finally paralysis of the Irish political scene after the death of Parnell.

Joyce, chronicler of Dublin, alternately realistic and nostalgic, depicts city of lost hopes and failing chances to end this collection with absolutely brilliant story The Dead in which Gabriel counts on some pleasant moments with his wife, while she’s yearning for her dead lover, and finally falling snow reconciles everything, covering equally the living and the dead.