Ireland permeates all of Joyce’s
writing, especially Ireland
during the early twentieth century, when Ireland sought independence from Great Britain.
In the last part of the nineteenth
century, the cultural revival of Ireland aimed at defining what it meant to be
Irish, to reinvigorate Irish language and culture, giving the Irish a sense of
pride in their identity. The movement celebrated Irish literature and
encouraged people to learn the Irish language, which many people were forgoing
in favour of the more modern English language.
Despite the cultural revival,
Ireland divided into factions of Protestants and Catholics, Conservatives and
Nationalists. Such social forces form a complex context for Joyce’s writing, who
did not witness such debates firsthand, though he never lost his artistic
interest in the city and country of his birth and articulated the Irish
experience in his writings.
Dubliners was published in 1914and
Joyce based many of the characters on real people, suggestive details, coupled with the book’s
historical and geographical precision and piercing examination of relationships.
Dubliners contains fifteen portraits of life in the Irish capital. Joyce
focuses on children and adults who skirt the middle class (housemaids, office
clerks, music teachers, students, shop girls, swindlers, and out-of-luck
businessmen). Joyce saw his collection as a looking glass with which the Irish
could observe and study themselves. In most of the stories, Joyce uses a
detached but perceptive narrative voice that displays these lives to the reader
in precise detail. Rather than present intricate dramas with complex plots,
these stories sketch daily situations in which not much seems to happen,. the
events may not appear profound, yet the characters’ personal and tragic
revelations are. The stories in Dubliners peer into the homes, hearts, and
minds of people whose lives connect and intermingle through the space and
spirit of Dublin.
A character from one story will mention the name of a character in another
story, and stories often have settings that appear in other stories. Such
subtle connections create a sense of shared experience and evoke a map of Dublin life ever present
in his works
Joyce first conceived of Ulysses as a
short story to be included in Dubliners, then decided to publish it as a
novel, as a sort of sequel to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ulysses
continues Stephen Dedalus’s life more than a year after where Portrait
leaves off. The novel introduces two Leopold and Molly Bloom, and takes place
on a single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin.
Ulysses strives to achieve realism by rendering the
thoughts and actions of its main characters, both trivial and significant, in a
fragmented form similar to the way thoughts, perceptions, and memories appear
in our minds. In Dubliners, Joyce had tried to give his stories a
heightened sense of realism by incorporating real people and places into them, which
is a feature of Ulysses. At the same time Ulysses works on a
mythic level, by way of a series of parallels with Homer’s Odyssey.
Stephen, Bloom, and Molly correspond to Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope, and
each of the eighteen episodes of the novel corresponds to an adventure from the
Odyssey.
