The Dubliners

For decades now, the works of James Joyce have been studied in colleges and reviewed severally by renown scholars of Literature, not because they are of any particular inclination but because of the artistic use of social representation utilized by the author. Dubliners are among Joyce’s works that among other things, received attention in the scholarly circles of literature. The series of short stories with a collection of books is a mark above the rest when it comes to societal representation and critique. A book collected after his college, Joyce is fathomed at the pace of life at his home country Ireland. The mere fact that his compatriots treated life itself as a sick person makes him bemoan the courage of his people. Drawn into the conflicting insights of religion and education, James sees Ireland be a suffering country. With a medical background, he can provide a diagnosis of his ailing country and compares it to Paralysis. The link is rather satirical as much as it is deliberate. A country suffering from indecision and is at the brink of death because of its divided constructive ways. On one side, religion pushes for conservativeness while on the other, education is championing for open-mindedness and innovation. The dilemma situation one find self is of the painful conditions same as paralysis. The review of the James Joyce’s series- Dubliners in this paper focuses on three previous appraisals by scholars. The papers in the discussion include the works of Florence Walzl and two of Gerhard Friedrich’s articles.

The authors, both place emphasis on two particular stories from the Dubliners collection. These are the Dead and the Sisters. In argument, Freidrich in his article, “The Gnomonic Clue to James Joyce Dubliners” suggests that the story – the Dead – received much attention compared to the other works as it introduced some themes in Joyce’s work. His comparison is to the musical composition that repetitively brought forth the variation of ideas to a sort of somber finale. Joyce according to the two scholars had presided over the development of an artistically acknowledged perception and concepts that indeed existed in Ireland. As observed, the tragedy of self-realization and social growth took a long time to shape among the Dubliners. The authors proceed to highlight the intentions that made Joyce to actually, write the stories. According to various scholarly accounts, the urge to write a major chapter of Ireland’s morals motivated James leading to an interesting twist of a short story series. He chose Dublin as the epicenter of the rather paralytic societal existence. It was such pronouncements that in return drawn the attention of the people to his work.
It is notable that James features the use of the word paralysis, prominently in his initial story, the Sisters. By using the boy narrator to envision the fear and anxiety that resulted from the condition, James symbolically leads his audiences to the point of self-examination. He, however, uses no more the term in the subsequent plots as the stories border immensely on the growth of the narrator covering both stages of adolescent and adulthood. Freidrich constantly refers to the analogy by James as an additional identification of the author (Friedrich 426). The sarcastic symbolism and motifs employed by Joyce are to an extent related to the paralysis-gnomon-simony triad created by Freidrich to describe Joyce’s works. The harmonious chord of comparison helps describe the social decadence as illustrated by Joyce in the face of society-paralysis, gnomon-Euclid, and simony in a catechism. The parallelism derived from the triumvirate is a link that exists between the society, the religion, and education. The search for knowledge as it were, has brought forth a new paradigm in the way people thought the life that seems to create an imbalance in ways of thought. In his work, Joyce creation of these links centers upon the vivid description of the schoolboy’s world, and how it was in fact subdued with consciousness. The narrator in his innocence tries to figure out the best out of a quagmire that is nonexistent to those living happily during the vacations.
By incorporating Father James Flynn in his characterization, the author Joyce uses him as the symbol of the religion, the church. The depiction of him being paralytic carries a lot of meaning in analyzing the attitudes that associated to the church in the context of the book. It is susceptible that the author in his writing identifies to the Father, a catechist who seemed to be dying of paralysis (Walzl 225; Friedrich 426). The prognosis is unique in that, the author’ conditions ones he got home from his studies is in a situation of trying to find himself in a society that remains divided by moral, education and religion. As of the conditions, the society vividly was suffering from a weakening side, this per se, was the paralytic situation that the Dubliners, in the eyes of Joyce bring forth. Ireland and especially Dublin city was undergoing a situation where moral of the society remained no longer prioritized as people looked forward to education and innovation. Innovative ways were becoming the stronger sides of the dying Ireland. In contrast, the religion that once was strong and wholly keeping the moral integrity of the society was weakening (Walzl 228). The loss of energy and mojo was resulting from the new ways of life that corrupted the catechists and priests of the church. The society was becoming crippled in a gradual steadfast manner loosening its sensibility and authority over the people.
In the story the sisters, like a parallelogram, Joyce focuses much on the defective slanted edges of social existence. He dwelt much on the incompletely consistent areas of human society. His highlight of the broken relationships, through the characters involved in the book, a vivid chronology of ‘weird’ earthly relations intoxicates the social system (Friedrich 426). The gnomonic life and death of the Father Flynn, the two unmarried sisters, and the poor boy’s guardians are all relationships pointing to a broken crumbling social system are but all symbolic of the situation in Ireland.
The concluding life of the priest always struggling by himself to keep up with life routines such as sitting near the fireplace, or getting into his confession box and talking to himself are the signs of an unending trauma facing the society (Friedrich 421). The book ends with the death of the priest symbolizing a morally dead society with people struggling to cope up and find a balance between the right and wrong. By tying the conclusions of both the Sister and the death with the darkness of actual ending in lives of characters, the author managed to get the point through on the significance of moral observance within a society.
Works Cited
Friedrich, Gerhard. “The Gnomonic Clue to James Joyce’s Dubliners.” Modern Language Notes 72.6 (1957): 421-424.
Friedrich, Gerhard. “The Perspective of Joyce’s Dubliners.” College English 26.6 (1965): 421-426.
Walzl, Florence L. “Pattern of Paralysis in Joyce’s Dubliners: A Study of the Original Framework.” College English 22.4 (1961): 221-228.