Dubliners

About this book

Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, published in 1914. It was his first book of fiction and remains his most accessible. Each story is set in Dublin around the turn of the twentieth century and follows an ordinary inhabitant of the city through a small episode: a funeral visit, a boat trip that does not happen, a boarding-house engagement, an office worker’s evening, a Christmas party.

The book is read a century on partly because it changed what a short story could do. Joyce wrote in a flat, exact style that refuses to explain itself, and he built the stories toward moments he called epiphanies, points at which a character, or only the reader, suddenly sees a situation whole. Writers of short fiction have been working with and against this model ever since.

The story

There is no single story, but the collection has a shape. Joyce arranged the pieces to move through the stages of a life. The first three, told in the first person by a boy, deal with childhood. The next group follows adolescents and young adults, then men and women in middle life, and the last stories turn to public life: politics, religion and the arts in the city.

The final and longest piece, “The Dead,” is set at a dinner party given by two elderly sisters on the Feast of the Epiphany. It follows their nephew Gabriel Conroy through the evening’s speeches and songs and ends in a hotel room afterward. It is often published and taught on its own and is widely regarded as one of the finest short stories in English.

Themes and historical context

Joyce said he chose Dublin because it seemed to him the center of paralysis, and paralysis, moral and social, is the condition the stories keep returning to. Characters sense a way out of their lives and fail to take it. The Dublin of the book is a provincial capital under British rule, dominated by the Catholic Church, still in the shadow of Charles Stewart Parnell’s fall, and short of money and prospects for most of its people.

The book’s publication history is part of its reputation. Joyce finished most of the stories by 1905, but publishers and printers objected to passages they thought indecent or libelous, including the use of real pub names and references to the king. One printer destroyed the proofs. The collection finally appeared in 1914, the same year A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began to be serialized, and it sold slowly at first.

Dubliners is realist fiction, and in that sense it belongs with the French and Russian writers Joyce admired, particularly Flaubert and Chekhov. What makes it a modernist book is the discipline of its method: no narrator explains, no story ends with a resolution, and the reader is trusted to notice what the characters miss.

Who should read it

Dubliners is the right entry point to Joyce. The sentences are plain, the stories are short, and nothing here requires the apparatus that Ulysses does. The difficulty is in the reticence: readers used to being told what a story means may finish some of these unsure what happened. A small amount of background on Irish politics and Catholic practice of the period helps, and the notes in a good annotated edition pay off. The whole book can be read in a few sittings; “The Dead” alone takes about an hour.

Edition notes

The Gutenberg transcription was prepared by David Reed, Karol Pietrzak and David Widger. The collection appears on Gutenberg’s list of banned books drawn from Anne Haight’s survey, a reflection of its troubled path to publication rather than any later prohibition.