Scarica Themes, Symbols, and Characters in Joyce's Dubliners and A Portrait e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE Dubliners It consists of 15 short stories in which there isn’t action but human situations and moral, social or spiritual revelation. The stories are divided into four groups: ● Childhood ● Adolescence ● Maturity ● Public life —> The Dead = it was a late addition and it summarizes themes of the other stories and it is a sort of epilogue. Dublin Joyce was hostile to city life in fact his Dublin is a place where true feelings and compassion for others don’t exist. He chose Dublin because for him that city was the centre of a mental and psychological paralysis. This city represents the incapacity to react, James Joyce was able to react but he is aware of the incapacity of the Irish people. Even when they want to escape, Joyce’s Dubliners are unable to because they are spiritually weak. The symbolism and the epiphany ● The function of symbolism was to take the reader beyond the usual aspects of life through the analysis of the particular. ● The epiphany is the sudden spiritual manifestation caused by everyday situation or an external object which reveals the character’s truths. Style ● The interior monologue —> the narrator tends to disappear in the interior monologue, which is in the form of free direct speech: the protagonist’s thoughts are introduced without any reporting verbs. In this way the reader has a direct knowledge of the character’s mind. ● Chiasmus —> it is the repetition of images which creates melodic effects. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man It is a novel of education which involves a young man, Stephen Daedalus, a young Irish writer, in search of experience and success. It is set in Dublin and follows Stephen’s life from childhood through adolescence until the age of 20. Stephen is the son of a poor father and Catholic mother. He begins to rebel against his family and his religious. At the end he goes voluntary exile in Paris. In the title the indefinite article “a” means that this novel is only one of the possible interpretations of a subject which is the mind of the protagonist. The hero Stephen Dedalus stands for Joyce himself or for the artist in general. Like the mythological Daedalus, Stephen must escape from the social, political labyrinth of Dublin’s life. There is a transformation of the character over the course of the novel: ● The first —> is from a shy little boy to a great student who understands social interactions. ● The second —> is when he sleeps with a prostitute and so from innocence to corruption. ● The third —> is from a sinner to a devout Catholic. But the most important transformation is from religiousness to a new devotion to art and beauty. The epiphany on the beach mark his transition from belief in God to belief in aesthetic beauty. Style The novel begins with a third-person narrator and ends with a first-person narrator. Joyce represented the complex inner lives of his characters by different points of view. Stephen is the unifying consciousness for each of five chapters and the readers see the world the way he does. The third-person narrator disappears when Stephen narrates his own experiences with the use of free direct speech. Ulysses It is a long novel set in Dublin on one single day 16 June 1904, this is the Blooms day that is the day in which Joyce met his wife. There are three characters: ● Dedalus —> he is the protagonist of the first three episodes called “the Telemachiad” ● Leopold Bloom —> a middle-aged Jewish advertising salesman. He is the protagonist of “the Odyssey” but also of “Nostos” that is the third section in which Leopold backs home to his loving but unfaithful wife Molly. ● Molly —> the section ends with Molly's monologue that is a flowing stream of consciousness prose in eight unpunctuated sentences. A modern Odyssey Joyce’s Ulysses is an epic novel which offers different visions of daily life, political and cultural discussion and reflection on the human condition. Each episode offers its own style, in particular for each episode we found: ● A title referring to a character or incident from Homer’s The Odyssey; ● A time and place ● A symbol and a narrative technique. Joyce’s constant references to Homer’s The Odyssey and to the world of ancient mythology to underline the squalid reality of modernity. The “mythical method” adopted by Joyce is very similar to one used by T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land: both writers use ancient myths to represent the modern world as a place where heroism has disappeared and sterility dominates.
