Dubliners: Youth, Adulthood, Public Life
Youth
In the four novels about youth two feminine figures are counterbalanced by two masculine figures. Eveline, one of the main characters of the first novel, still not the protagonist, is the mirror image of the masculine world around her. She has to decide whether to leave her home or not to follow Frank, her fiancée. Her hesitation to join her ‘open-hearted, beloved, manly’ Frank in Buenos Aires is a result of the passionate chaos inside her, a hesitation stemming from the counterposition of her familiar room, lonely lunatic father and the romance surrounding Frank. This feminine figure is to be put in correspondence with Jimmy who forsakes poverty for the luxurious life, the anti-Dublin life, a life imagined as careless action, just the opposite of Eveline`s consideration of life. On the other hand, the last two stories of the ‘Youth’ are both metaphors of prostitution even though with respect to the opposite sexes. {Click here to enroll yourself in the best online SPANISH course}
The gentle antitheses of the first pages are growing sharper as the conflict between the public fact and the private dream becomes stronger and is incarnated in these two kinds of women and men. Later these polar opposites will meet each other and realize that they are meeting themselves.
Adulthood
So far the children of ‘The Sisters’, ‘An encounter’ and ‘Araby’ grew into the protagonists of ‘Eveline’, ‘After the race’, ‘Two Gallants’ and ‘The boarding house’, and now those very protagonist will be seen in their adulthood, their portraits will be drawn in ‘A little cloud’, ‘Counterparts’, ‘Clay’ and ‘A painful case’. In ‘A little cloud’ two opposites meat each other, and a parallel can be traced with ‘After the race’ and with ‘Two Gallants’. Lenehan’s resilience has turned into incommunicable loneliness in Chandler, while his counterpart isn’t much different from him in his underlying reality, he has simply ‘chosen’ a different attitude towards the world and in some way towards his own character. Still, even though opposites in appearance, the underlying essence is identical. The novel ends with Chandler trying to appear like Garrehan, by ‘living bravely’ when shouting to the baby ‘Shut up!’, but soon is taken over by remorse. {Click here to enroll yourself in the best online FRENCH course}
In ‘Counterparts’ the context of the story is mechanism and how the employer’s rebuke passes through human cogs and levers of the copy-machine that is Farrington and emerges at the other end as the flailing of a cane on the thighs of a small boy. Contrary to what we see in ‘A little cloud’, where emphasis is put so much on individuals as to be almost a denial of community, here there is a pseudo-community of drinking.
Maria is ‘Clay’ as humanity, she is presented as a living dead, extremely docile.
In ‘A painful case’, we can notice a recurrence of the themes of the preceding stories, solitude, isolation, automatism and living death. The protagonist here is a victim of his unlived life, he soon becomes prey of ghosts that are nothing more but the form in which missed passions return. All these ghosts are the antithesis of the world of the boot-heels. The story ends with the recognition of solitude from Mr. Duffy, an epiphany. {Click here to enroll yourself in the best online GERMAN course}
Public life
In this Joycian ‘section’ the shadow cast upon Dubliners by eminent Irish figures, which contribute to render them paralytics in ‘Ivy day in Committee room’, the factitious culture of the cultured-in-appearance world in ‘A Mother’ and the hollow religious feelings of the protagonists, ‘Grace’, are portrayed. Still in the last story, ‘The Dead’, the insight is even deeper and, after several epiphanies, we have the final long epiphany that Gabriel experiences, an epiphany that leads him to realize the life-in-a-shell that Dubliners, he included, live. In Dublin, life seems to pay tribute to what is dead and rooted in the past. {Click here to enroll yourself in the best online FRENCH course}
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