Dubliners

For the three stories in this section, Joyce ages his narrators up, following characters in their late teens to early twenties. They’ve left childhood behind but are still only at the cusp of adult maturity. “Eveline” introduces the first female protagonist in the collection—written in third person, but remaining intimate and close, providing a structural transition from the first-person narration of the collection’s opening stories.

In “Eveline” Joyce suggests that The Inertia and Paralysis of the Mundane contributes to The Futility of Love and Infatuation. Extremely passive, Eveline allows life to happen around her rather than putting events into motion herself. Joyce positions this failing as her tragic flaw: When faced with the moment to take action, Eveline finds herself unable to move forward and leave her former life behind. The story opens by establishing Eveline’s world, including her challenging family life, her tedious responsibilities, her department store job (one of the few acceptable employment opportunities for young women at this time), and the lack of love and respect in her life: “But in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like that. Then she would be married—she, Eveline. People would treat her with respect then” (35). She compares her own circumstances with the disempowerment her mother felt in her life with Eveline’s father, highlighting Eveline’s fears of remaining at home with an alcoholic father. Joyce sets up a choice for Eveline between leaving unhappy but familiar circumstances behind to pursue a new life in Buenos Aires or remaining stuck in the status quo.

Joyce draws a parallel between Eveline’s new relationship with her boyfriend Frank and the romance in “Araby.” In both cases, the protagonist becomes infatuated with the idea of romance and how it will change their life, rather than with the reality of a true human connection with the object of their affection. As Eveline gets closer to the moment when she must actually leave the familiar behind, her perspective shifts as she begins to romanticize her home life with her father instead. When faced with her new life ahead of her and her old one behind, she reverts to the inertia and paralysis of the mundane yet familiar, unable to step into the unknown.

In “After the Race” Joyce employs a dramatic shift in tone, moving from a young woman’s character-driven internal retrospective to a more plot-driven, interpersonal story between a group of raucous friends. Joyce sets the story against the backdrop of a cosmopolitan, international race in Dublin—which the narrator refers to as “this channel of poverty and inaction” (40). As a poor country, Ireland is unable to participate in the race, placing them instead in the position of cheering on teams from nations that keep them subjugated. When the four friends are introduced, their circumstances and attitudes mirror this political undercurrent: The Frenchman, the most affluent, has the most authority over the group, with his Canadian cousin coming up in the world under his influence (reflecting France’s colonization of Canada). Joyce depicts the Hungarian as content, though more focused on worldly needs than financial acclaim, while Jimmy Doyle represents the socio-economic aspiration of the Irish, embroiled in a constant effort to keep up—an ethos that also permeates Jimmy’s home life. Joyce describes it as “a certain pride mingled with his parents’ trepidation, a certain eagerness, also, to play fast and loose, for the names of great foreign cities have at least this virtue” (43). The party is later joined by an Englishman and an American, rounding out the geographical and political influences of the evening. Toward the end of the story, Joyce’s sentence structure turns shorter and snappier, suggesting an escalation of pacing and dramatic tension.

Joyce’s exploration of insubstantial and opportunistic friendships continues in in “Two Gallants,” in which the transactional relationship between two male friends underscores the collection’s engagement with Imbalances of Power. Joyce makes the imbalance immediately apparent in the way one friend occupies the majority of the available space in the conversation, exhibiting a desperation for attention and validation. Their conversation takes on a traditionally masculine lens in its examination of women, adding a gendered layer to the exploration of imbalances of power. The friends’ view of women illustrates their transactional approach to relationships, an element that culminates in the story’s closing image of the gold coin. Joyce positions the two central characters, Corley and Lenehan, as foils for each other with Corley’s arrogance exacerbating Lenehan’s need for connection. At one point, Corley shows a fragment of vulnerability through his memories of a girl he cared for, before disappearing in pursuit of shallower, cathartic pleasures. In the meantime, Lenehan is left to occupy himself, a practice at which he isn’t particularly adept. He begins to consider his advancing age and his lack of fulfillment in his life which the narrator describes as his “poverty of purse and spirit” (55), highlighting his sense of the inertia and paralysis of the mundane. Like many others in Dubliners, Lenehan feels held in a state of stasis. The only way for him to find some approximation of the life he is missing is to experience it through his friend. In each of these three stories, young adults who should be at the threshold of the most fertile growth stages in their lives find themselves paralyzed, unable to embody their true potential.