Dubliners: The City James Joyce Asked His Readers to Look At

James Joyce’s Ulysses has a reputation that can precede it by years. I had heard the jokes about how many people write about the book compared with how many finish it. Dubliners gives you a different entrance to his work.

In On Writing, Stephen King retells a story about Joyce producing seven words in a day and then agonizing over their order. I remembered it here because so much in these stories depends on what a writer chooses to put next to an ordinary word.

A Looking Glass for Dublin

Dubliners follows fictional people in the city as Joyce knew it. He compared the book to a polished looking glass in a letter to his publisher. There are intimate scenes, public conversations and rooms that seem to keep a person in place. The book lets you see some of what they could not say openly.

There are fifteen stories, with a different person or circle at the center of each. Seen together, their small, private decisions begin to make up a picture of a city.

1. The Sisters
2. An Encounter
3. Araby
4. Eveline
5. After the Race
6. Two Gallants
7. The Boarding House
8. A Little Cloud
9. Counterparts
10. Clay
11. A Painful Case
12. Ivy Day in the Committee Room
13. A Mother
14. Grace
15. The Dead

From The Sisters to The Dead

Death enters in the first story and returns in the last. By the end of “The Dead,” I am less sure where to draw the line between the people being remembered and the people doing the remembering. Being alive is not always the same as living with attention to those around you.

What Joyce Calls an Epiphany

The religious sense of Epiphany is associated with the Magi’s visit in Matthew. Joyce uses the word for a moment when an ordinary gesture, sight or phrase suddenly shows more than a character had understood.

I think of the last scene of “Araby.” A boy goes to the bazaar carrying a whole picture of himself and what he intends to do. By the time he stands there in the darkness, that picture has changed. The setting is small, but the change is one he will have to live with.

Dubliners may be an easier way into Joyce than Ulysses. The lives it depicts can still be hard to sit with. Reading them gave me a feeling for a Dublin I had never seen, and for what can happen to a person when the world stays familiar a little too long.