Dubliners

Given James Joyce's literary experiments in his later novels Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), it's all the more striking how clear and plain the prose is in his first book Dubliners (1914), a collection of short stories. It's analogous to a young Picasso working at traditional drawings before the radical experiments of his Cubist period. While the general consensus among art critics is that the young Picasso was not much of a draftsman, the same cannot be said for Joyce's short stories.

The collection contains many features that are commonplace today, but were highly unusual in 1914 when the book was published: the stories end not in plot resolution, but suddenly when a character realizes something about him/herself; a few stories consist almost entirely of dialogue; and a narrative thread connects the stories to make the book seem more like a novel than a collection of separate tales.

Characters' circumstances in Dubliners do not change. But what does change is their understanding of their lives, what Joyce called an "epiphany," a concept he borrowed from Catholicism and applied to literature. The ancient Greek word epiphaneia means a sudden appearance by a god. Catholicism uses this word to refer to Christ's manifestation as a human being. Joyce's meaning--which, due to his writings, is now the most common meaning--is a sudden realization. Throughout Dubliners we find characters enmeshed in difficult situations who suddenly see through and come to understand something about themselves and their social conditions.