Joyce's Achievement in Dubliners

In the 13 June 2014 article "James Joyce's 'Dubliners' still worth celebrating 100 years later" in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the author notes:

Joyce used his collection's 15 stories to piteously examine how life in his native city — provincial, intolerant, hypocritical and awash in drink — had deformed its politically frustrated, economically backward and spiritually bankrupt residents.

This captures well the sense I got from re-reading the full collection of Joyce's short stories.

"Araby," for instance, is both poignant and disturbing:  poignant for the pubescent discoveries and energy it depicts; disturbing for the alcohol-ridden parental neglect and abuse.  The same comes through in "Eveline" in the moments in which the eponymous character recalls her childhood and the beatings that her brothers took.  One could cite other stories in this vein.

There is a bleak and gloomy mood infusing Dubliners.  Simultaneously, two features make the collection of individual stories unusually relevant to readers whether they are in childhood, adolescence, or maturity, and whether they are quietly solitary or publicly celebrated.  One literary thread is the epiphanies that characters have in stories throughout the volume, and the other lies in the narratives of hope and disappointment.

Dealing with disappointment and doubt -- that is Dubliners.  That is life.  And that is the literary achievement of Joyce in this collection, which peels back our understanding of universal experience through the particular experiences of his Dubliners.  It is fitting, then, that after Ulysses was published Joyce remarked, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."

Joyce does more than this, however, because in tapping into readers' emotions through his narratives, he not only reveals something of what is contained in the universal but also nudges us to change the universal, or common, experiences through particular lives.  Who, for instance, will not shudder at the alcoholic beatings that seemed to characterize so many late 19th-century Irish homes, at the absentee and derelict fathers and husbands, at the harping and un-empathetic wives and mothers?  And who then will not seek to alter one's own life narrative in a positive direction, and who will not then seek to provide relief to others who suffer in such ways?  Who will not read "The Dead" and wonder about the structures of local community in which one is a member, and how one could strengthen such personal ties?

Among the themes in Dubliners that struck me particularly was that of (dis)contentment.  Many of Joyce's characters contemplate what might be or might have been. I am thinking here in particular of Little Chandler in "A Little Cloud," Eveline Hill in "Eveline," Mr. Duffy in "A Painful Case," and Gretta Conroy in "The Dead." There is a longing for a different path, or at least a struggle with the present path because of what could have been or what might be different.

That theme has been represented much elsewhere in art and literature. The nostalgia for a lost love (and perhaps also dissatisfaction with a present lover), or of a different adult life, is the subject of Ibsen's play A Doll's House with Nora's abandonment of her family.  That work also questions, as does Joyce's in a different way, what marriage and family are.  Both feature characters deeply concerned with self-discovery.  Here the two literary features that I mentioned earlier, epiphany and the tension between hope and disappointment, meet.

Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century seems dire and difficult. Family structures seem challenged. Male delinquency in family and society seems rife. Some stories are painful to read (particularly those of fathers, as already noted, who are physically abusive), but that visceral reaction also means that Joyce was connecting to me as a reader at an emotional level.  I could understand in a heightened way the emotional complexity of some male characters, too, especially when family dynamics or treatment of them seemed unfair, as with Little Chandler.  And yet he thinks, through Byron, of a different life, of leaving behind his present familial commitments, of the poetic excitement of possibilities.  His wife reprimands him.  He does not change his status, unlike Nora in Ibsen.  Neither does Eveline, who aborts her trip to Argentina at the last moment.

Characters in Dubliners seem stuck ("paralysis" is the term often used based on its appearance in the opening story), even as they have mental epiphanies that transport them to new situations, new lives, or the possible ones that they did not live.  They struggle with a sense of their own identity in community and family and with their contentment or acceptance of the lives that they have.  To unearth the intricacies of these universal concerns through his stories and to fuel by them the personal epiphanies of particular readers is at the core of Joyce's achievement in Dubliners.