We can see the development of the protagonist of one story in another, though the name changes from one story to another. The stories in Dubliners are though different apparently, but they are the different facets of a single story, a single Irish story. These stories tell of the stagnation, corruption, depravity of the people in Irish society. In these stories, he has shown the inability of the characters to move forward, as we can see in ‘Eveline,’ ‘Araby,’ ‘The Dead’ as what is the temperament of the people of the age. It is a bleak description of Dublin and its inhabitants.

In his stories, he has assigned both of them antagonistic roles, though not explicitly everywhere. He blamed two factors for this underdog status, one was Britain, and the other was the Roman Catholic Church. The time during which Joyce wrote about Dublin, it was a rural, unsophisticated city, having no cosmopolitan value like other European cities. Some of the characters like Lenehan and Bob Doran from these short stories appear in his later books, in more developed forms. In this collection, Joyce perfected the skills of characterization, plotting, dialogue, description, and point of view. It is a work which he used to perfect his skills and later exhibited these skills in his later works. Though like other artistic works of great writers, this work seems deceptively simple, the more deeply it is studied, the more it yields. He draws a perfect picture of it, its citizens, and portrays his nostalgia for this city.ĭubliners is one of James Joyce’s easily accessible and comprehensible books in contrast to his other books, The Story of an Artist as Young Man and Ulysses. Though Joyce didn’t reside in Dublin during his professional life, his works are still about Dublin and his memories of this city.

All the stories in this compilation are about Irish people, with an Irish setting, giving the nuance that Irish are a separate entity on their own and need independence. It is a portrayal of the Irish middle-class in the early twentieth century. It was written not much later after the Irish Potato-Famine and then the subsequent movements that tried to defy the atrocious British rule during his stay in Ireland and Italy in the early 1900s.

Its origin can be historically traced in the period of Irish Nationalism when anti-British sentiment was high. It later made a place in his compilation of short stories Dubliners (1914).

It was published for the first time in 1904 in the Irish Homestead. Eveline is a short story by renowned author James Joyce.

An encounter james joyce