Introduction

Dubliners consists of fifteen stories; Joyce said he wished to write a chapter of the 'moral history' of his country, and Dublin was 'the centre of paralysis'. The stories are arranged in the order of childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life: a boy faces the death of an old priest; a boy goes to a bazaar to buy a gift for the girl he loves and arrives as it is closing: 'Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity'; a young woman on the quay about to sail away with her lover grips the iron railing at the last moment and does not move; a clerk humiliated in a pub goes home and beats his son. The last story, 'The Dead', is among the most beautiful novellas in English: after a Christmas party the hero learns that his wife has always cherished the memory of a boy who died for her, while outside the snow falls faintly upon all the living and the dead.