JAMES JOYCE (Dubliners and Ulysses), Appunti di Inglese

Scarica JAMES JOYCE (Dubliners and Ulysses) e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! James Joyce James Joyce was born in Dublin and all his works are setting in this city. At the age of 20, finding life in Ireland an obstacle to his own artistic development, he went first to Paris, then to Pola and finally to Trieste, in Italy. In Trieste he finished his important work Dubliners, in 1914, a collection of short stories. In Italy he was the teacher of Italo Svevo. Then he moved to Zurich and here he started working on his masterpiece, Ulysses. In 1920 he moved to Paris, where he met Ezra Pound, a French poet who helped him to found the publisher of Ulysses, that nobody wanted to publish. It is finally published in 1922, thanks to a French bookseller, Sylvia Beach. In 1940, when France was occupied by Germans, he returns to Zurich and died in 1941. The relationship between Joyce and Ireland is complex because he both hated and loved Dublin. For this, he seemed to have rejected everything that was Irish but all of Joyce’s works are centered on Ireland and on Dublin. He reproduced its people, streets, houses and language with great care of precise details. Finally, he described Dublin as the navel of the world. DUBLINERS Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories setting in Dublin, in each of which the failure of the self-realization of an inhabitant of Dublin is examined in biographical and psychological detail. The first fourteen stories had all been written il 1905, but the last and the longest story, The dead, was finished in 1907 and the complete collection came out in 1914. The aim of the work is that it gives a realistic portrait of ordinary people, doing ordinary things living in ordinary city, as Virginia Wolf said. Dublin is defined by Joyce the center of the paralysis, word that means passivity, inertia and lack of ambitions. The paralysis, in fact, is that of will, courage and self-knowledge, that leads ordinary people to accept the limitation imposed by the social context they live in. This kind of paralysis is described in a physical, spiritual and moral point of view. The sense of paralysis is presented in four stages: - Childhood. - Youth. - Maturity. - Public life. Regarding the style, the style of Dubliners is complex because it is apparently realistic, to the point of perfectly recreating characters, places, streets of contemporary Dublin. But, on the other hand, Joyce make use of a symbolism that gives the common objects unforeseen depth. Joyce used the narrative technique of the epiphany, definition coined by himself, that means manifestation, showing. The epiphany is the moment when a simple object or fact suddenly explodes with meaning and make a person realize his condition. It is the manifestation or the sudden revelation of the reality through a casual event or object. EVELINE The short story Eveline belongs to the section of Youth. However, in Dublin’s passive life, youth isn’t synonymous with vitality and enthusiasm but the contrary. The protagonist of the story is a girl of 18 years old, Eveline, who lives in Dublin. The beginning of the story show the day that is dying and the young woman is watching out of the window of her room while she is thinking. Joyce says “she was tired” to indicate her tiredness with the life she is living and not in a physical point of view. She is thinking because she faces a big dilemma regarding his future life. In fact, the story has at its centre a love story. Eveline is undecided if leave Dublin with her boyfriend Frank or stay in Ireland with her family. So, she has agreed to run away from his oppressive and violent father and her miserable home to follow Frank to Buenos Aires (name chosen by Joyce for the meaning it evokes). But at the end, when the two lovers arrive in the Station at the North Wall, she doesn’t have the courage to go aboard the ship that would take her and Frank to Buenos Aires because she remains paralyzed, in fact she stands on the quay, unable to move. In this short story the epiphany is the moment in which Eveline listens the music of a street organ and she remembers her childhood and precisely her mother. A PAINFUL CASE The story A painful case belongs to the section of maturity e tells the life of two people, Mr. Duffy, a bank cashier of middle age who lives alone and isolated and Mrs Sinico, with which he starts a deep intellectual relationship. One evening, Mrs. Sinico reveals to Duffy her infatuation with him and Mr. Duffy, from that moment, refuses to see her thinking that any emotional bond is only a source of pain. Mr. Duffy presented himself as a man trapped in his daily routine and isolation and, in fact, the paralysis in his mature life consists with the inability to change his life. Once four years have passed, he discovered that Mrs. Sinico died overwhelmed by a train, possibly committing suicide. So, he realizes that he has abandoned Mrs. Sinico to her tragic fate, in fact, walking through the park, he sees two lovers and this image makes him understand he was alone and paralyzed in his passive life, and also that his paralysis ruined the life of another person. Moreover, he comes to the painful conclusion that he is the author of his own miserable fate. In this story the epiphany is the moment in which Mr. Duffy is at the park and sees the two lovers who show him that he lost a chance. THE DEAD The short story The dead is the last and the longest story of Dubliners and it belongs to the four section of the work, that of the public life. It can be consider a kind of bridge between Dubliners and Ulysses. The main character of the story are Gabriel and Gretta, who are married and the third character is Michael, who his the first dead lover of Gretta. The story is setting in the New Year’s Eve, when Gabriel and Gretta, after the party organized by Gabriel’s aunts, and after a pleasant evening full of singing, music and good food, return to their hotel. Gabriel, is excited and physically desires his wife. However, she is distracted because, as they were leaving the party, she heard a guest singing an old irish folk song which reminds her of her young love. In fact, when she was in Galway with her grandmother, he knew Michael Furey, a boy she fell in love with and used to sing the same song. He died at the age of seventeen and Gretta thinks that he is died for her. This is the first epiphany of the story, so the moment in which Gretta listen the song. The first epiphany creates the second one, that of Gabriel. In fact, in the hotel, seeing his wife absorbed and sad, Gabriel asks her the reason and at this moment Gretta begins her confession, that reveals to Gabriel a new awareness of of his relationship. The epiphany of Gabriel takes place in three moments: he first looks himself at the mirror because he realizes he doesn’t know his wife as well as he thought. Then, he starts to thinking and he understand that he has a meaningless role in Gretta’s life. Finally, he looks out the window of the room, seeing the snow covering the landscape. The snow is also a symbolic element because it is the same for the death and the living ones. It represents the catharsis purification because through the snow the people of Dublin can purify himself. Through this story Joyce enunciates a universal truth described in a very simple way, in fact, Gabriel realizes that deaths are more alive than the living ones, specially than the Dubliners, in fact, Michael is more present than Gabriel in Gretta’s mind.