On James Joyce's Dubliners

6 January 2026

Tripping Without Traveling: On James Joyce’s Dubliners

About five years ago, one of my Comp I students mentioned with pride that he was reading Finnegan’s Wake, and I did a bit of research on the book to better understand why he believed this was such a feat. Do a quick Google/Wiki search and you’ll learn why, yourself. Then, for some reason, based on that conversation, I had convinced myself it would be some remarkable thing to read James Joyce—he must be exceptionally difficult to digest as a writer overall, no? What other author would attempt a novel so “difficult and experimental”?

It turns out this was a major misapprehension.

About two months ago, I was out exploring my new hometown (having just moved to rural North Carolina) and found myself perusing the stacks of books for sale at our local library. There are always gems, right? How can a bibliophile resist?

Hidden amidst the uncategorized, unsorted, unalphabetized stacks of books I found a 1962 Viking Press edition of Joyce’s Dubliners, and based on my previous assumptions about Joyce I was startled: the book was tiny! At just 214 pages, it appeared to be a compilation of manageable short stories. I hugged it against my chest. It did not matter the price; I was most definitely going home with this book.

What amuses me, and therefore I must include here, is that when I took the book to the library checkout counter, they admitted that none of the books were technically for purchase. Although the sign said I owed fifty cents for the book, the librarians insisted the books were free for the taking, and they ask only for a donation in exchange, if it could be afforded. This was equally good and bad news for me. I stood there with a twenty-dollar bill in my hand, as I was certain they would not take my credit card for fifty cents, and I had no other cash. But they did not have change for a twenty.

“Just take it,” the head librarian said with a smile.

Ultimately, I paid twenty dollars for the book—with no grief!

So. Joyce was born in the late 1800s and wrote the bulk of his work around the turn of the century, which might place him at the late Victorian era, except that his writing is considered modernist. His larger works like Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake might be intimidating, but Dubliners, this quaint compilation of short stories, certainly is not.

Dubliners confused me at first. I was expecting these short stories to be somehow interrelated by characters. For example, the first few stories are written in first-person with young male protagonists, and I thought that maybe they were the same boy/young man and that the stories were building upon one another. It turns out this is not the case. A few stories later, Joyce shifts to third person and he provides the reader with more character names, and we understand these are distinct individuals throughout. I determined this also by Googling the text, whence I learned that the stories are interrelated by the protagonists’ ages (in each story, the protagonist seems slightly older than the last) and the overarching themes. You can research a list of themes, if you like; I’m not going to spend much time on that, here. I’ve learned my book reviews do not need to take the form of literary analysis, which is liberating.

James’s stories in Dubliners represent everyday characters operating in ordinary daily life circumstances within Dublin’s city boundaries at the turn of the 20^th century. As such, each portrayal is very raw and realistic, and in many ways dark, broody, and sinister. The snapshots of each character reveal both the banality and complexity of human nature in ways that are delightful, insightful, and – well – sometimes also depressing? But I kind of love Joyce for this. I’m not a fan of embellishing a story to make it palatable.

My favorite stories are these three: “A Painful Case,” “A Mother,” and “The Dead.”

“A Painful Case” is the story of an older bachelor, Mr. Duffy, who lives an intentionally austere existence until he enters a sort of ongoing engagement with a married woman, Mrs. Sinico. While engaged with her over the course of some months—in conversation and nothing more—the man releases his death-grip of control for a moment and truly lives by being authentic with another person. This carries on until one day, “Mrs. Sinico caught up his hand passionately and pressed it to her cheek” (111). At this moment, Duffy catches the ick as he realizes the relationship means something more to Mrs. Sinico than it does to him; an emotional engagement was never something that appealed to him, a man of rigid rules. He breaks it off. Four years later, Sinico dies in an unfortunate train accident that for some reason reminds me of Anna Karenina, and Duffy seems to consider his liaison with her a close call: “The whole narrative of her death revolted him and it revolted him to think that he had ever spoken to her of what he held sacred […] Not merely had she degraded herself; she had degraded him” (115). Why did this story speak to me so? I think it is those moments that Duffy was able to let go of himself with Sinico and truly connect. His life was so lonely and sad up to that point, that I wanted this to be something worthwhile for him. But Joyce could not let that be, I guess, and I don’t hate Joyce for that. This ending is more real, and it feels accurate to the characters/personalities involved.

“A Mother” is a proverbial dance mom tale. The mother engages the managers of a concert hall to pay her daughter to play the piano for them four nights in a row (Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday). The daughter is not all that great, but she is a bit of an ingenue. The concert entails many other musicians, but by the mother’s design, her daughter is the Prima Donna of the show. By the end of the four days, the mother has not been paid her daughter’s wages, so she pitches a fit and refuses to let her daughter play. Ultimately, this ruins the final show. No happy ending here, either. The daughter is ticked with her mother, but she has no choice other than to go with it. This story sticks in my mind because of Honey Boo Boo. That’s it. It’s relatable. I’ve seen this behavior from pageant moms, dance moms, gymnastics moms, etc. Mothers too often live vicariously through their children’s accomplishments, and it’s impossible to avert one’s gaze from that train as it wrecks.

“The Dead” is, by far, my favorite of the stories. It is also the longest, and perhaps these two are related. Because of its length, we are permitted to grow more attached to the characters in the story. I will not provide a summary of this one. Suffice it to say, it rent my heart in two to witness this beautiful man’s (Gabriel’s) love for his wife as he learns that he was never her first love, and he can never occupy that space. Gabriel’s emotions throughout this story are so well illustrated and available, that the reader has no choice but to feel compassion for him. Here’s an example:

            She was walking on before him so lightly and so erect that he longed to run after her noiselessly, catch her by the shoulders and say something foolish and affectionate into her ear. She seemed to him so frail that he longed to defend her against something and then to be alone with her. Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory. A heliotrope envelope was lying beside his breakfast-cup and he was caressing it with his hand. Birds were twittering in the ivy and the sunny web of the curtain was shimmering along the floor: he could not eat for happiness. They were standing on the crowded platform and he was placing a ticket inside the warm palm of her glove. He was standing with her in the cold, looking in through a grated window at a man making bottles in a roaring furnace. It was very cold. Her face, fragrant in the cold air, was quite close to his; and suddenly he called out to the man at the furnace:

            “Is the fire hot, sir?”

            But the man could not hear with the noise of the furnace. It was just as well. He might have answered rudely.

            A  wave of yet more tender joy escaped from his heart and went coursing in warm flood along his arteries. Like the tender fire of stars moments of their lives together, that no one knew or would ever know of, broke upon and illumined his memory. (213)

It all lies in the way that Joyce expresses this man’s emotions through his mental state and through his perceptions of the world around him. This is so insightful and engaging, and I’d like to learn this from Joyce and carry it forward into my own fiction. We do not always have to say the way the protagonist is feeling outright. We also do not always need to rely on what they are doing, as in body language, to suggest their emotions. We can illustrate their moods by exploring their thoughts and perceptions, instead. In this excerpt, we learn the extent of Gabriel’s nearly desperate love for his wife without him ever saying it. And from this, we are then left just as bereft and grief-stricken as Gabriel when we learn that his wife loved someone else in this very same way before she and Gabriel ever met.

Five of five stars, truly. This quick, beautiful, timeless, life-altering read provides insights into Dublin culture at the turn into the 20^th century and the nuances of human nature.