James Joyce called his work Dubliners "to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city". It is this paralysis - spiritual and moral - that concerns Joyce here. The work itself has been subjected to numerous analyses, pointing out the stories' intertwined nature, parallels to Homer, Dantean levels of approach. As Joyce himself said, the stories are grouped by "four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life". This implies a linear progression, one however I think should be resisted by the reader in order to see how cyclical, how turned in upon itself, the work is.

To begin, one can read the opening story as a prelude to all that are to come:

The opening story, "The Sisters" chronicles the death of an elderly priest in whom we are given the first glance of "paralysis". In this priest we have morality/spirituality and worldliness juxtaposed, and in constant tension. The priest’s hemiplegia (paralysis of one side of the body) has affected his faith: "It was the chalice that he broke...that was the beginning of it". While morality lies there prostrate, worldliness abounds. The “constant showers of snuff” coincide with the greening of his “ancient priestly garments”. Joyce further illuminates this paralysis when the boy takes a Dantean journey in his dreams. He meets the priest's "grey face" and realizes his own smile is an attempt "to absolve the simoniac of his sin". The simony participated in by the priest was the peddling of his own soul.

The gravity of the symbol offered by Joyce is summed up by Old Cotter’s remark about the priest: “There was something uncanny about him...”. According to Freud, “everything is unheimlich (uncanny) that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to life”. And this is where Joyce constructs the framework for the rest of the stories. The uncanniness that should have remained hidden is humanity’s subjugating, paralyzing, the moral side of Being for the benefit of the other, worldly side. The consequence of allowing this hemiplegia to occur, to come to light in the symbol of this priest, is personified in the boy’s discovering “a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death”.

The death, one may postulate, came well before the actual moment his heart stopped beating- it came when his priestly garb became snuff-stained. But this exchange, spiritual for worldly, is not reserved for the priest alone. Instead, in the symbol of the priest we are given the framework for interpreting the rest of the stories. We are to watch the resultant spiritual and moral hemiplegia that comes from being "freed from something".

We are reminded of the connectivity of this story to those that follow by Joyce himself. In ‘An Encounter’ we are told that Joe Dillon had a “vocation for the priesthood”. In ‘Araby’, the former tenant of the house was a priest, one who died in the back drawing-room. In ‘Eveline’ there is a yellowed photograph of a priest hanging on the wall. The priest from ‘The Sisters’ looms in the background of Dublin throughout these stories. This inter-connectivity is as important as any of the individual stories.

The most ingenious of these connections, for me is Joyce’s entitling the last story, ‘The Dead’. This entitling accomplishes two things. First, it completes the circumference of the circle started by the initial story. That is, the titles of the first and last stories are interchangeable. However, if Joyce had swapped titles, the connection would not have been as apparent. The similarities between these stories makes one wonder whether the boy of the first story could not have been a younger Gabriel. The work does not support this claim but this is not of importance. The importance is that the claim surfaces in the reader’s mind so that, once again the cyclical nature of the work comes to light.

The second thing accomplished by the ‘The Dead’ was to provide a subtitle to the work as a whole. ‘The Dead’ refer to the victims of various tints of hemiplegia; the living dead of Dublin- who continue to live aimlessly, those who have not gone “boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion”. These living Dead are all present at the party given by ‘the sisters’. It is at this party we see the culmination of the decline Joyce has been describing in his stories. In Gabriel, we have either a sign of hope (his epiphany) or despair (his resignation acceptance).

The ambiance of ‘Dubliners’, the rich moist soil Joyce cultivates is best summed up by the boy in the story ‘Araby’: “I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger”.

This is a wonderful collection of stories, that each do their part to make up one unified whole.
4 Stars.