Mar 02, 2009 05:53 PM
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Is it necessary that a good work of writing will be significant for you or the story also has to catch the brain? Will you just read a story for its development of characters and great writing?
I picked up a book of James Joyce named “Dubliners”. Before that I couldn’t have imagined of reading James Joyce as to read a book on philosophy is a gigantic task in itself. Dublinersis a compilation of total 15 short stories.
The ability of Joyce to capture the world by representing words amazingly impressed me. Every story is very realistic and surprisingly readable. However the stories sometimes were somewhat lagging in terms of the plot. He seemed to give a clue at some issues and sometimes it felt that too much was left to be guessed, but still the stories are quite readable and enjoyable too. I recommend these classy stories of Joyce for their beautiful writings and the manner in which the characterization is developed skillfully. The stories are an example that a story sometimes doesn’t make something excellent to read and enjoy but the writings certainly make it a flourishing affair.
Dublinersis a short collection of stories by James Joyce where Irish life is portrayed especially the life of Dubliners. Each story conveys a great portrayal of the people, the setting and the situations in which they live. The whole collection shows a variety of such portrayals. At the end of every portrayal, I did think that Joyce had wanted to transmit the despair in each of the normal situation of life. While every story captures the various characters in the different stages of life, similar desperation spreads through every lives in the logically connected settings
Here Dublin is set in the backdrop and the self awareness of the characters are played out in the interiors and streets of Dublin. As a reader you will not find any boisterously playing plots here, but the portrayal of characters are very rewarding and open ended. Many characters are sometimes at a turning point or divine manifestation, many of them are not lovable, but nobody escapes from the moral judging of the writer. This book is not of a type that spoon feeds the opinions and attitudes.
James Joyce reveals here the adventures of a boy which leads him to a child molester, a young lady planning to run away but chooses the safety of domestic forced labour at the final moment, an owner of a boarding house who ignores even when her daughter gets pregnant through one of the resident of his boarding house, a frustrated and angered clerk who is always game for alcoholic drinks and abuses his family and the colleagues with whom he works. An emotional remote individual who rejects with contempt the feelings of a woman and then has to tackle himself with loneliness when he sees the news of her death in a paper. In the last story” The Death” an educated but a socially inconvenient character who realizes suddenly that the lack of his engagement with his own life is very crippling in nature.
All these characters do not appear to be doing their best to entertain the reader but they are abundantly covered in their own real situations .The traps of the religions pass through the stories titled “The holy ghost and the banshee, poverty, fear, rage, repression and drink. Dubliners is just like a vast portrait of a family which is very early taken at dawn after a very long and harsh night, there is no romantic interpretation and it may not depict the full truth, but you will surely acknowledge that these shadowy eyes and the physically and mentally fatigued individuals have a distinctive reality.
James Joyce has written the best short stories of his career in this book and I will definitely recommend the avid readers to have a look into the world of the 19th and 20th century of Irish history by reading this impeccable book and catch on the religious and political attributes of that times.
