Essay on Character Movement in James Joyce's Dubliners

Character Movement in Dubliners

In a letter to his publisher, Grant Richards, concerning his collection of stories called Dubliners, James Joyce wrote:

My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the resentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard (Peake 2).

Joyce's passion for Dublin presents itself in the copious detail he uses in Dubliners. No street name, tower, pub, or church is left unspecified. Joyce often boasted to his brother Stanislaus that if Dublin were to disappear off the face of the earth, it would not be difficult to reconstruct it, simply based on Joyce's work (Walzl 169). Though all but three of the Dubliners stories were written while Joyce was in self-imposed exile form Ireland, he describes strolls his characters took throughout Dublin, carefully noting every turn of every street corner. The movements Joyce notes are not arbitrary, but symbolic. Joyce intended for his audience to give special attention to the direction of the characters' movements. In most of the stories, the East symbolizes willful exile and escape. Movements westward indicate acceptance of corruption and eternal paralysis. In Dubliners, Joyce uses symbolic physical movement to trace the different stages of paralysis in his characters.

In the three childhood stories, "Sist...

... middle of paper ...

...ements of his book" (60). The movements of Joyce's characters in his work Dubliners offer a telling picture of where Joyce predicted the city of Dublin was headed.

Works Cited

Bidwell, Bruce and Linda Heffer. The Joycean Way: A Topographic Guide to Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Johns Hopkins: Baltimore, 1981.

Gifford, Don. Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. University of California: Berkeley, 1982.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. Penguin Books: New York, 1975.

Peake, C.H. James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist. Stanford University: Stanford, 1977.

Tindall, William York. A Reader's Guide to James Joyce. Noonday Press: New York, 1959.

Walzl, Florence L. "Dubliners." A Companion Study to James Joyce. Ed. Zack Bowen and James F. Carens. Greenwood Press: London, 1984.