Bloomsday - Dubliners by James Joyce

Today marks Bloomsday - a whole day devoted to celebrating James Joyce's life through his novel Ulysses (set on 16 June 1904).  It's called Bloomsday after Leopold Bloom, the main character in Ulysses.  This is also the day most purists actually read Ulysses... but not me.  I'm still in awe of this epic novel, and even though I would be able to recognise parts from Homer's Odyssey... I'll start my first celebration of Bloomsday by reading Joyce's Dubliners.


Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories, which are meant to reflect the various types of Dubliners.  Most of the stories refer to adolescents and young adults, which - for me at least - also shows the contrast with the established, older generation and describes their desperate attempts at their future ...



The stories cover pretty much everyday themes:  dealing with death, missed opportunities, politics and religion, family, survival.  The narrator in each story  is either an anonymous interested party, or one of the main actors, who nevertheless retains anonymity - as if observing life from a distance.  I found this technique very effective, for I never felt as if Joyce was telling these stories from a biased perspective, trying to elevate Dublin to an exemplary city.  


On the contrary, I could see that he even made the effort to show the negative aspects in Dublin life, where brutality is not uncommon ("Counterparts"), politics are based on business ("After the race") or on theory only ("Ivy Day") - in both cases, this back-fires and the loser is always the Irish. Women are also portrayed justly, as they struggle (this is 1914) to be taken seriously as bread-winners ("The Boarding House") while at the same time having to appear ladylike - and the difficult tasks that ensue ("A Mother").  I found the endings very interesting, because they were usually rather abrupt - just as they should be:  these stories are meant to be reflections, for a limited time, of the life of a Dubliner, and I was left with a feeling of wanting more.


I could identify with most stories, because I could discern almost everywhere the sense of fleeing -  a sense of being imprisoned by the routine of one's situation and a desire to escape from the present.  Escape is something we all wish for at some point, even during better times, but all the more so in the present-day world, where economics and morals are at an all-time low. I really wondered at how much the stories told in Dubliners could well have been told for our times, outside Dublin,  and how the world has not (apparently) evolved that much, after all...


The story that stayed most in my mind is "Eveline" - the girl who couldn't leave her oppressing family behind and start a new (married) life abroad. Given the time this was written, I am certain many women found themselves holding on to the (rather grim) past and their sense of duty and not being able to take the leap of faith into the future. 

"... the pitiful vision of her mother's life laid its spell on the very quick of her being - that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness"

It filled me with sadness, because I can well imagine many young women even nowadays, having these exact same thoughts that those women did in 1914 - almost a century ago...


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Are you interested in Bloomsday and Ulysses?  Follow the reading experience of Délaissé and Charlotte!