Dubliners by James Joyce

...

After actually trying to do well in work, Farrington just does what he did all along and drinks unnecessary amounts. It’s the alcohol that is continuously streaming inside Farrington that leads him to lose all recognition for everything. His family and how he is looked upon by others are sweeping him towards alcoholism as he sells his watch for money to buy more drinks in this moment of paralysis: “Suddenly as he is fingering / his watch-chain, he thought of Terry Kelly’s pawn / office in Fleet Street” (88). Farrington’s feeling’s lead him towards violence with his family, and he becomes less of a family man which compares to Gabriel from “The Dead” in being that Gabriel is a family man and that’s something he is proud of. We know Gabriel is a family man because he is asked to cut the goose: “Gabriel, Aunt Kate wants to know won’t you carve / the goose as usual.”(191) “Counterparts” is a story of a man searching for a means to escape his soundings like Gabriel from “The Dead”, we learned he tries to find a way to escape from his retched land: “Well, we usually go to France or Belgium or perhaps / Germany, said Gabriel awkwardly… / partly for a change.”(189).The only thing Farrington finds in his journey is alcohol and the feeling of failure all around him; he is a man entrapped in his own life.

In the story, “Eveline”, we meet a young woman named Eveline, who is looking to escape her background but cannot seem to come to a closure about what she wants to do with her life. Her father and the thought of her mother are holding her down. Eveline wants to escape, she wants to distance herself from her day-to-day routines of living so she can forget her past: “She looked round the room, reviewing all its / familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for / so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust / came from” (30). Escaping her memories of the past and present means escaping her home life, where she has develop into the robust woman she is now. She finds a new lover Frank, who could be the means of her escape to Buenos Ayres. She voices her thoughts as if they are a fantasy: “Escape! She / must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her / life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live.” (33). She has lost out on her own life trying to maintain home life. We can tell Eveline hasn’t really experienced life in the way she wanted too and has a lack of fulfillment in her life. Now it has become time for her to escape that life.

Eveline wants to un-entrap herself from her past and present but that means fleeing from her father who has supported and helped her grow up to be a strong woman, also the promise she made her mother to take care of the home life the best she could. She has always enjoyed her father’s company, but her looming decision is feed by the fact her father is becoming more aggressive with her. We can see that family is an important subject in this story as in “The Dead” and “Counterparts”. As we learned the symbol of windows Joyce introduces to us is very important. Eveline makes her final epiphany searching for an answer while looking through a window: “Her time was running out but she continued to sit by / the window, leaning her head against the window curtain, / inhaling the odour of dusty cretonne” (32). Eveline hears the street organ playing like the last night of her mother’s illness which draws her back to the memory of her mother’s promise:

Down far in the avenue she could hear a street organ playing… Strange that it should come that very night to remind her of the promise to her mother, her promise to keep the home together as long as she could. (32-33)

Eveline’s past has come back to haunt her. This can easily relate to Gretta and Micheal fury in “The Dead”. All the hope Eveline saw and all the good she has fantasized of has been crushed abruptly and entraps her in the ordinary life she wanted to get out of.

All of the characters we’ve met in Dubliners are trying to escape their pain. In these stories escaping in the sense of true euphoria has not really came to be. James Joyce stuff’s his book of short stories with many moments of paralysis, with the sense of individuals entrapped in their own doings and not succeeding at living their true hopes and wants. You have to really dig deep into these stories to find an important theme to connect them with. Dubliner’s truly is a book showing how Irish people were at that time (in Joyce’s perspective) as this is a third person narrative. Dubliners is an assortment of different journeys of different Irish peoples life’s. The sense of entrapment within Dubliners seems to stay with us after finishing the book. One can only wonder what the honest and true feelings of James Joyce were at that time.

Works Cited

Joyce, James. Dubliners. Editors. Terence Brown. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 1993. Print.