ClassicNote on Dubliners
http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/dubliners/themes.html
Main
Themes:
The Stages of Life: Dubliners is roughly organized into a
framework chronicling a human life: we begin with younger
protagonists, and then move forward into stories with
increasingly aged men and women. Although this is a broad
generalization, the stories also tend to increase in complexity.
"Araby," "An Encounter," and "Eveline," for example, are fairly
simple and short tales. "The Dead," the final tale of the
collection, is nearly three times as long as the average story
in Dubliners. It is also the richest of the stories,
weaving together many of the previous themes of the book.
Joyce's portrait of Dublin life moves not only across a small
range of classes (the poor and the middle class) but also across
the different periods of a human life.
Poverty and Class Differences: Poverty is one of the
most pervasive themes of the novel. Joyce usually evokes it
through detail: the plum cake Maria busy in "Clay," for example,
is a humble treat that costs her a good chunk of her salary.
Characters rail against their poverty. Lenehan in "Two Gallants"
sees no future for himself, and sits down to a miserable supper
consisting only of peas and ginger beer. Farrington of
"Counterparts" stays in a hateful job because he has no other
options. His misery is such that he ends up spending far more
than he can afford on booze. We catch glimpses of slums, as in
"An Encounter," when the two young schoolboys see poor children
without fully comprehending what their ragged clothes imply
about the small children's home conditions and prospects in
life. Dublin's poor economy is also the reason why characters
must fret about keeping even miserable jobs. Poverty is never
pretty in Dubliners. For every gentle, poor soul like
Maria, there are numerous revolting characters like Corley and
Lenehan of "Two Gallants." Joyce explores the negative affects
poverty has on the character.
Colonization and Irish Politics: Dublin is a defeated
city, the old capitol of a conquered nation. At the time of the
stories, she is even more so: the Irish political world is still
suffering from the loss of the nationalist movement's greatest
leader, Charles Stewart Parnell. Joyce does not exactly write to
rally; his appraisal of the state of Irish politics and the
effects of colonization on the Irish psyche are both quite
bleak. Nor does he agree with many of the policies and cultural
initiatives embraced by some nationalists: he was no fan of the
Irish language movement, and he was unimpressed by a good deal
of the Irish art being produced in his period.
Defeat, Powerlessness, Stasis, Imprisonment, and Paralysis:
These five themes are closely connected. The colonization of
Ireland is paralleled by the sense of defeat and powerlessness
in the lives of individuals. In many stories, characters are so
trapped by their conditions that struggling seems pointless. In
"Counterparts," for example, Farrington is allowed one moment of
triumph when he publicly humiliates his tyrannical boss. But for
that one moment, Farrington is made to grovel in private, and he
knows afterward that his life at work will become even more
unpleasant.
Joyce conveys this powerlessness through stasis. In Dublin,
not much moves. At times the paralysis is literal: note Father
Flynn in "The Sisters." At other times, the stasis is a state of
life, as with the frustrated Little Chandler of "A Little
Cloud." This feeling of stasis is closely connected to a feeling
that Dublin is a kind of prison.
Many characters feel trapped. We begin with a paralyzed
priest in "The Sisters," followed by frustrated schoolboys
trapped by Dublin's tedium in "An Encounter," followed by a boy
without the means to indulge his fantasies in "Araby," followed
by a young woman crushed by the stifling conditions that entrap
her at home in "Eveline" . . . most of the characters are in
some way imprisoned. The entrapment is often caused by a
combination of circumstances: poverty, social pressure, family
situation. Sometimes, the imprisonment comes from the guile of
another character, as with the hapless Mr. Doran in "The
Boarding House."
The frustration caused by this stasis, impotence, and
imprisonment has a horrible effect on the human spirit. Often,
the weak in Dubliners deal with their frustration by
bullying the still weaker. Mahony of "An Encounter" picks on
small children and animals, Little Chandler and Farrington, in
two back-to-back stories, take out their frustrations on their
children.
Longing for Escape: The natural complement to the
above themes. Its first expression comes from the boys of "An
Encounter," whose dreams of the American Wild West provide an
escape from the tedium of Dublin. Unfortunately, most of the
characters are unable to escape. Eveline finds herself too
frightened to leave Ireland; Farrington finds even alcohol
unsatisfying; Little Chandler realizes he'll never find the
focus to be a poet. The greatest barrier to escape is sometime
psychological, as it is with Eveline. Escape is also a central
theme of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. As an
Irish writer who lived most of his adult life abroad, Joyce was
obsessed with the liberating effects of fleeing Ireland, and he
transfers that obsession, in one form or another, onto many of
the characters in Dubliners.
Isolation: Dubliners has some profoundly lonely
characters in it, but the theme of isolation does not end there.
Isolation is not only a matter of living alone; it comes from
the recognition that a man or woman's subjectivity is only their
own, inaccessible to all others. Failed communication is common
throughout the stories. In other stories, conversations are
striking for how little meaningful communication takes place.
The supreme example of this theme in Dubliners comes in
the dead, when Gabriel and Gretta leave the party. While Gabriel
thinks about his life with Gretta and how much he desires her,
Gretta cannot stop thinking about the young boy, her first love,
who died for need of her. Husband and wife have been in the same
room, but they may as well have been on different planets.
Mortality: Mortality is another theme, a natural
result of Joyce's stages-of-life structure. But the stories at
the end of the collection, where the characters tend to be older,
are not the only ones to deal with mortality. Dubliners
begins with "The Sisters," a story about a young child's first
intimate experience with death. Thus the collection begins and
ends with the theme of mortality. The preoccupation with
mortality puts a bleak spin on the themes of stasis and
paralysis: although it often feels in Dublin like time isn't
moving, Joyce reminds us that the steady crawl toward death is
one movement we can count on. |