Dubliners

James Joyce

Feb 2023 · Diamond Pocket Books Pvt Ltd

About this eBook

Dubliners is a collection of short stories written by James Joyce. It was written in 1904–07 and published in 1914. The basis for Dubliners is the three stories he had published under the pseudonym Stephen Dedalus. The author has put a well-calibrated structure. Narrated in the first person, the first three stories portray children. The next four deal with young adults, and are told by a third person, whose tone and sensibility shifts to reflect that of the changing protagonists. The following four stories concern mature life from middle age onward. And the next three deal with the public life of politics, art, and religion.

The Dead, the final story, is considered a world masterpiece in short story telling. It is set before, during, and after an evening Christmas party attended by Gabriel and Gretta Conroy and their friends and relatives. It leads gradually to Gabriel’s late-night revelation about his life and marriage when a tender song reminds Gretta of a boy who died of love for her.

About the author

James Joyce was an acclaimed Irish novelist. He was famous for his experimental use of language and exploration of new literary methods in such large works of fiction as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. While attempting assiduously to excel at the art of writing, Joyce wrote verses and experimented with short prose passages that he called “epiphanies,” a word that author used to describe his accounts of moments when the real truth about some person or object was revealed.

When Joyce’s Stephen Hero didn’t succeed in bringing in the artistic form that he desired, he rewrote it as “a work in five chapters” under a title — A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. traces the intellectual and emotional development of a young man and ends with his decision to leave Dublin for Paris to devote his life to art.