"Dubliners": Portraits of the Artist as a Narrator

Abstract

Joyce's explicit statements concerning his artistic intentions in Dubliners are not very useful as basis for interpretation. Admittedly, they identify some of themes in collection; but they do not provide insight into its challenges. We read book at very superficial level if we assume it narrates a chapter of moral history of Ireland, with Dublin serving as the centre of paralysis. Joyce's outline for arrangement of stories, moreover, lists only obvious categories: childhood, adolescence, mature life, and public life. 2 Yet it is upon evidence of these remarks from his correspondence that many arguments for unity have been founded. Critics who have taken this point of departure have usually had to supplement their arguments for narrative and thematic relationships with source studies, intricate symbolic systems, and biographical backgrounds. Ultimately, they have oversimplified difficult question of sequence; and they have neglected fact that Joyce relocated some of stories when he was getting book ready for publication. They have concluded, for example, that The Dead is nihilistic coda and that Joyce conceived it as protest against his native land; or, as in work of Homer 0. Brown, they have said that final story in Dubliners reverses meaning of book by celebrating self-knowledge and self-acceptance and breaks link between Joyce and narrator of earlier stories. 3 Professor Brown's point is certainly tenable; and it makes sense both in terms of Joyce's exile from, but continuing love for, Ireland. Dubliners, however, supports another theory, one which proposes that stories are studies in growth of Joyce's developing and maturing consciousness and that his exploration of this growth-imaging also his formal interest in narrative art-gives book coherence. For purposes of orientation in discussion of Dubliners, perhaps we should begin with an observation which Joyce made in 1900: Life we must accept as we see it before our eyes, men and women as we meet them in real world, not as we apprehend them in world of faery. 4