Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubliners

The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by various converging ideas and influences. Joyce felt Irish nationalism, like Catholicism and British rule of Ireland, was responsible for a collective paralysis.[2] He conceived of Dubliners as a “nicely polished looking-glass”[3] held up to the Irish and a “first step towards [their] spiritual liberation”.[4]

Joyce’s concept of epiphany[5] is exemplified in the moment a character experiences self-understanding or illumination. The first three stories in the collection are narrated by child protagonists, while the subsequent stories are written in the third person and deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people, in line with Joyce’s division of the collection into “childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life”.[6]

Source: Dubliners – Wikipedia

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Dubliners is James Joyce’s first book and contains a collection of fifteen vignettes providing moments in people’s lives. The book is broken down into four parts: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. Although the stories are set in ‘Dublin’ around the beginning of the 20th century, they are very much stories which explore the inner world of characters. A key aspect to this is the use of free indirect speech.

Besides first-person and third-person narration, Dubliners employs free indirect discourse and shifts in narrative point of view. The collection progresses chronologically, beginning with stories of youth and progressing in age to culminate in “The Dead“.[9] Throughout, Joyce can be said to maintain “invisibility”, to use his own term for authorial effacement.[10] He wrote the stories “in a style of scrupulous meanness”, withholding comment on what is “seen and heard”.[11] Dubliners can be seen as a preface to the two novels that will follow,[12] and like them it “seeks a presentation so sharp that comment by the author would be interference”.[13]

Source: Dubliners – Wikipedia by

What I found interesting in listening to some commentary about the novel was how it was in fact rejected by many publishers as it was deemed that there were elements you could not publish at the time. It is hard to appreciate such things and the willingness of authors to persist with their own vision.

I really enjoyed Chris O’Dowd’s reading of the book too, via Audible, as well as Jacke Wilson’s reading of the final story ‘The Dead.’ (Part 1 and Part 2)

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