Dubliners

“A spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its influence, differences of culture and constitution were waived.”

“Differences of culture and constitution” was a reality of everyday life in early-20th-century Ireland, and particularly in Dublin, with regard to religion, political leanings, and social class. Here Joyce suggests that these distinctions are less prominent in childhood, when friends and neighbors are bound together by shared humanity instead of social, economic, and political identities, which he positions as artificial constructs and oversimplifications of the human experience.

“I had never spoken to her, except a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.”

Through the first-person narrator of Araby, Joyce represents the intensity of childhood infatuation. The speaker acknowledges that he’s never built a true connection with his crush; instead, his love comes from a constructed ideal of what object of his affection represents. While the story ends on a note of tragedy and stagnation, it highlights a key trope of coming-of-age narratives: first love. In the context of the collection as a whole, the story’s end reinforces Joyce’s thematic engagement with The Futility of Love and Infatuation.

“People knew that they were courting, and, when he sang about the lass that loves a sailor, she always felt pleasantly confused. […] First of all it had been an excitement for her to have a fellow and then she had begun to like him.”

In “Eveline” Joyce continues to explore the futility of love and infatuation based on the idea of a person rather than the reality of them. The protagonist, a young and inexperienced woman faced for the first time with the idea of being adored, grapples with the fact that her attraction to her boyfriend comes less from the man himself than who she becomes in his eyes. The story hinges on her decision to embrace an unknown adventure with a man she is still getting to know or remain stuck in The Inertia and Paralysis of the Mundane—the status quo of her life at home.

“He had money and he was popular; and he divided his time curiously between musical and motoring circles. Then he had been sent for a term to Cambridge to see a little life. His father, demonstrative, but covertly proud of the excess, had paid his bills and brought him home.”

Joyce uses the word “demonstrative” to suggest an artificial remonstration for the benefit of the father’s social circles. In reality, however, both father and son share an indulgent view of money, luxury, and self-image. This attitude, evidenced by the protagonist’s choice of activities, fuels his actions throughout the story.

“He knew that he would regret in the morning, but at present he was glad of the rest, glad of the dark stupor that would cover up his folly.”

Although the protagonist of the story has lost his money and perhaps some respect, he has also arrived at a moment of peace in between two points of upheaval. The suggestion that even though he’s experienced significant financial loss, it created a positive memory of life and lived experience, underscoring the ways in which both father and son prioritize opulence and excess over financial prudence.

“He was a sporting vagrant armed with a vast stock of stories, limericks, and riddles. He was insensitive to all kinds of discourtesy. No one knew how he achieved the stern task of living, but his name was vaguely associated with racing tissues.”

Joyce’s story follows a similar set of aspirational characters to “After the Race.” Juxtaposing a jovial image of a person full of “stories, limericks, and riddles” against the concept of life as a “stern task” establishes a lackadaisical attitude toward the demands of life on the part of the protagonist, with more attention given to the appreciation of the moment. Joyce positions this worldview as the thing that endears the character to those around him.

“Polly, of course, flirted with the young men, but Mrs. Mooney, who was a shrewd judge, knew that the young men were only passing the time away: none of them meant business.”

In “The Boarding House” Joyce offers an unapologetic view of love and infatuation as a business transaction, reinforcing the collection’s thematic interest in its futility for its own sake. He presents Polly as sexually charged without villainizing her, an approach he took in some of his other works and which contributed to the controversy surrounding his writing. Similar to the mother figure in “A Mother,” Mrs. Mooney is both protective and practical, manipulating gendered Imbalances of Power to assure her daughter’s safety while flouting social convention.

“The recollection of his confession of the night before was a cause of acute pain to him; the priest had drawn out every ridiculous detail of the affair, and in the end had so magnified his sin that he was almost thankful at being afforded a loophole of reparation.”

Here Joyce creates a hyperbolic experience for the man in question, whose sin of sexually engaging with a consensual woman becomes his undoing. Key words like “ridiculous” and “magnified” suggest the amplified nature of the experience and the man’s sense of inertia and paralysis within social convention. Though Joyce delivers the narrative with a light hand, he alludes to the wider, inescapable cultural stigmas in place.

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

Although spoken by an unreliable narrator—this line positions the protagonist’s lack of success not as a failing of the self, but rather a limitation of time and place, directly reflecting Joyce’s own attitude and experience. Joyce distanced himself from his home city of Dublin, preferring instead to explore continental Europe, much like the notorious star in this story.

“The adventure of meeting Gallaher after eight years, of finding himself with Gallaher in Corless’s surrounded by lights and noise, of listening to Gallaher’s stories and of sharing for a brief space Gallaher’s vagrant and triumphant life, upset the equipoise of his sensitive nature. He felt acutely the contrast between his own life and his friend’s, and it seemed to him unjust.”

The repeated use of Gallaher’s name (in place of an implied pronoun) acts as a rhetorical device that compounds the invasive effect of the character in his friend’s mind. Joyce creates an escalation of tension that highlights the intensity of the inertia and paralysis of the mundane that Little Chandler feel, alluding to a sense of suffocation that mirrors his attitude toward his domestic life.

“But they had never pulled together from the first, he and Mr. Alleyne, ever since the day Mr. Alleyne had overheard him mimicking his North of Ireland accent to amuse Higgins and Miss Parker; that had been the beginning of it.”

In setting “Clay” on Halloween (now an international holiday, but one that began in Ireland) Joyce portrays some of the folk customs associated with the Irish festivities. This moment references the tradition of sharing a sacred bread into which small tokens have been baked (similar to the tradition of Christmas crackers). Each token represents a fortune for the coming year. A ring meant that the recipient was soon to be married.

“Lizzie Fleming said that Maria was sure to get the ring and, though Fleming had said that for so many Hallow Eves, Maria had to laugh and say she didn’t want any ring or man either.”

In setting “Clay” on Halloween (now an international holiday, but one that began in Ireland) Joyce portrays some of the folk customs associated with the Irish festivities. This moment references the tradition of sharing a sacred bread into which small tokens have been baked (similar to the tradition of Christmas crackers). Each token represents a fortune for the coming year. A ring meant that the recipient was soon to be married.

“Mr. Duffy abhorred anything which betokened physical or mental disorder. A medieval doctor would have called him saturnine.”

Joyce’s choice of the word “saturnine”—evoking an alchemical system that attributes personality traits to the influence of the planets, in this case, Saturn—conveys a pithy and succinct description of the story’s protagonist. At the time (prior to technological and astronomical advances), Saturn was believed to be the most distant planet from the earth and as such was associated with darkness. The word describes someone with a moody, melancholy nature and often an element of mystery.

“Sometimes in return for his theories she gave out some fact of her own life. With almost maternal solicitude she urged him to let his nature open to the full: she became his confessor.”

Mr. Duffy’s view of Mrs. Sinico as his “confessor”—a word with an overt religious overtone—makes it clear that, for him, their connection is not sexual but rather rooted it instead in emotional intimacy. He also views her as “maternal,” further distancing their relationship from a romantic context and underscoring the futility of love and infatuation. The fact that Mrs. Sinico doesn’t share this perspective paints Mr. Duffy as an unreliable narrator, giving a new layer to the story’s narrative voice.

“No blame attached to anyone.”

“A Painful Case” remains one of the most contentious offerings in Joyce’s collection and one of the biggest obstacles to its publication as the publishers feared legal reprisal from the transport company regarding the train accident. In an intensive editing process, Joyce’s publishers required him to overtly explain that the transport company in the story wasn’t responsible for the woman’s death. This overcautious line was added intentionally as a device to protect the writer from libel.

“He is dead. Our Uncrowned King is dead.

O, Erin, mourn with grief and woe

For he lies dead whom the fell gang

Of modern hypocrites laid low.”

This first stanza of the fictional poem “The Death of Parnell,” featured within the world of the story, celebrates the notorious nationalist politician Charles Stewart Parnell, who died in 1891. In an example of loosely autobiographical metafiction, this poem offers a more polished and mature version of Joyce’s very first attempt at poetry. Parnell is referenced or alluded to in several of Joyce’s other works, including Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

“When the Irish revival began to be appreciable Mrs. Kearney determined to take advantage of her daughter’s name and brought an Irish teacher to the house. Kathleen and her sister sent Irish picture postcards to their friends and these friends sent back other Irish picture postcards.”

In “A Mother,” Joyce reflects the importance and re-emerging popularity of the spoken Irish language (sometimes referred to as “Gaelic” in American vernacular, but otherwise called “Irish”). At this point in history, the previously suppressed Irish people began to reclaim their culture through a revivalist study of art and literature, and speaking Irish came once again into fashion. Kearney, a traditional Irish name, gives these characters an edge in the new world order.

“She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure, and fixed; and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.”

Although this moment is delivered in an ironic and witty narrative tone, it reflects the deeper issue of gendered imbalances of power faced and grappled with by Mrs. Kearney and several other characters throughout the collection. Mrs. Kearney instinctively knows that she has more to offer intellectually, yet she is bound by the conventions of the time. Rather than fighting against them, she accepts them and navigates them as well as she is able.

“Religion for her was a habit, and she suspected that a man of her husband’s age would not change greatly before death. She was tempted to see a curious appropriateness in his accident and, but that she did not wish to seem bloody-minded, she would have told the gentlemen that Mr. Kernan’s tongue would not suffer by being shortened.”

This moment of introspection highlights a signature type of strong matriarch that features often in Joyce’s work. The narrator describes the longstanding marriage between the two characters, characterized by both derision and comfort. This quotation displays the author’s subtle wit and insight into the complexities of human relationships.

“He came to speak to business men and he would speak to them in a business-like way. If he might use the metaphor, he said, he was their spiritual accountant; and he wished each and every one of his hearers to open his books, the books of his spiritual life, and see if they tallied accurately with conscience.”

Catholicism and Catholic doctrine form a recurring motif throughout the collection. In an earlier story, the narrator comments on the needless overcomplexity of the religion’s central tenets. In this story, Joyce provides a counterpart to that perspective as the priest takes these same ideas and presents them in a compact, accessible way.

“The indelicate clacking of the men’s heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand.”

Here Joyce exemplifies the literary skill of “showing” a character’s personal failings through their actions and perspective rather than stating them through overt exposition. The protagonist of the story judges his fellow partygoers by inconsequential details, drawing a false connection between footwear and intellect. Through the character’s internal musings, Joyce conveys a sense that the protagonist himself is the one at an emotional and social disadvantage.

“He did not know how to meet her charge. He wanted to say that literature was above politics.”

Although the protagonist believes his work to be disconnected from the political landscape, Joyce uses the scene to acknowledge the intrinsic interconnection between politics and contemporary art of all mediums. An enormous amount of political turmoil surrounded the publication of these stories and the various artistic movements of the day, which endowed each prominent writer or artist with the power and opportunity to influence those politics.

“Beannacht libh.”

Beannacht libh means “blessings be with you,” a parting Irish greeting similar to “good health.” Mrs. Ivors’s choice to revert to the Irish language in this moment represents her final attempt to subvert the protagonist’s authority and peace of mind. Because the use of language was so contentious and politically charged, something as simple as hello or goodbye included its own political statement.