Overview

Through fifteen stories set in early twentieth-century Dublin, James Joyce explores the everyday lives of children, young people, and adults marked by moral, social, and emotional paralysis. His characters—clerks, artists, resigned women, aimless dreamers—experience small, intimate revelations, sudden moments of awareness that illuminate, if only briefly, the truth of their lives.

Style and Themes

With a sober, precise, and deeply innovative style, Joyce abandons conventional dramatism to reveal the grandeur and the tragedy of the ordinary. Dubliners is a work of eloquent silences and minimal gestures, in which each story unveils the complexity of the human soul and turns the city of Dublin into a living character—oppressive and endearing at once.

Significance

An essential book for understanding the birth of modern narrative.