2. Dubliners

‘Dubliners’ discusses James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914). The majority of these stories are not susceptible to a straightforward narrative summary and the most learned of critics understand the stories in the most contradictory fashion. Indeed, multiple narratives which defy any resolution are one of the key strategies of Dubliners. In addition, place in Dubliners is tightly tied to time. Joyce characterized his stories as a ‘chapter in the moral history of my country’. The themes of the stories include hospitality, the figure of the mother, and Dublin’s inability to live.