JAMES JOYCE (life, voyages, works, main features) & DUBLINERS, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica JAMES JOYCE (life, voyages, works, main features) & DUBLINERS e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882. His parents were fervent Irish Catholics and supported the Irish nationalist party of Charles Stewart Parnell (the leader). He studied at Jesuit schools and later graduated from the catholic Dublin University in foreign languages. He considered himself a European more than an Irish man. When he came of age, he rejected both Catholicism and Ireland, so he rebelled against his upbringing (When his mother died, he left Ireland forever). His was the revolt of the heretic writer and artist against the nationalistic role the Irish catholic Church had taken on in preventing English Protestantism and British colonization of Ireland. That’s why he was also against the Celtic revival, and he criticized his leader, William Butler Yeats, a symbolist, and the author of famous poems. The Celtic Revival, referring to the past and the world of Irish legends, mythology, and all customs, wanted to create a national conscience that would support the struggle for the independence of Ireland. On the contrary Joyce believed that the only way to increase Irelands’ awareness was by offering a realistic portrait of life in Dublin and Ireland, from a European, cosmopolitan viewpoint, denouncing the provincialism of life and culture of Irish society. He denounced the culture and atmosphere of Dublin and Ireland, which didn’t offer any opportunity to a writer. However, he mainly wrote about Dublin and his native country. This is quite strange, since he lived apart from Ireland all his life (in Paris, Trieste, Switzerland). He wanted to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people doing ordinary things and living ordinary lives. By doing this, he succeeded in representing the whole of man's mental, emotional, and biological reality, combining it with the cultural heritage of modern civilization as well as with the reality of the natural world around him. He established himself on the Continent and spent some time in Paris, where he intended to pursue a writing career, but his mother's fatal illness in 1903 brought him back to Dublin. It was in this period that he began to seriously imagine his future career as a writer and published his first short story, The Sisters, in the Evening Telegraph. It would eventually serve as the opening in his Dubliners collection. In June 1904 he met and fell in love with Nora Barnacle, a 20-year-old girl who was working as a chambermaid in a hotel. They had their first date on 16th June, which was to become the bloomsday of “Ulysses”. Voyages: ▪ TRIESTE (1905-15) In 1905 the couple settled in Trieste, where Joyce began teaching English and made friends with Italo Svevo. Joyce and Nora had two children, Giorgio and Lucia, and they got married in 1931. The years in Trieste were difficult, filled with disappointment and financial problems → in fact, Joyce was in trouble with publishers and printers because of obscene elements in his prose, and as a result the first of his works to appear in book form was a collection of 36 short poems, Chamber Music (1907).The book had no great success but the poet Ezra Pound liked his unconventional style and helped him print “A portrait of a young man” (1916), his semi autobiographical novel. In 1914 Joyce also wrote most of his naturalistic drama Exiles. Dubliners (1914) was completed in 1905 but only published on the eve of WWI. ZURICH (1915-20) In 1915 Joyce moved to Zurich together with his family, since his position as a British national in Austrian-occupied Trieste left him no alternative. Although Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist had established him as a writer, they didn’t help him with his financial difficulties. In 1917 he received the first of several anonymous donations which allowed him to continue writing the novel Ulysses, which began to appear in serial form in The Little Review in 1918 but was suspended in 1920 due to obscenity. PARIS (1920-40) In 1920 Joyce moved to Paris, where Ulysses was finally published by Sylvia Beach. This novel drew both praise and sharp criticism; Pound acclaimed it and T.S. Eliot declared that Ulysses was the most important expression which the modern age has found → Yeats considered it a work of a genius. ➔ The novel traces the experiences of Mr. Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and the poet Stephen Dedalus from A Portrait of the Artist, on a single day, 16th June 1904, in Dublin. This period of success was also characterized by the worsening of Lucia's mental illness. Lucia's condition deteriorated and she was sent to a mental hospital in Paris. Despite everything he was going through (he was going blind, and Joyce’s father died), he continued to write on what was eventually to be published as Finnegans Wake in 1939. With its variety of puns and new words, this novel was even more difficult to read than his previous work. However, the book was an immediate success, also in the USA and the UK. ZURICH (1940-41) In 1940, when France was occupied by the Germans, Joyce, Nora, and Giorgio returned to Zurich, the city that had first given them refuge during World War I. Joyce never saw the conclusion of World War II. Following an intestinal operation, he died at the age of 59 in January 1941. He was buried in Zurich. → Being a modern writer he is an introspective writer. He belongs in the so called “Years of Strain”, that cover the period from the first World War, 1914 and 1950. He belongs to modernism → a cultural and artistic movement that expressed the deep changes in thought and feeling that characterized the first decades of the 20th century. Other modern writers were Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence (“Sons and Lovers”), Katherine Mansfield (“The garden party”) → All these introspective writers, through the stream of consciousness, revealed the basic solitude of the individual (of modern man) and his inability to communicate. In fact, the main theme of all modern novels is → the relationship between love and solitude (while in the 19th or 18th century, the main theme the authors dealt with was the relationship between wealth and virtue) →Joyce lived in the period of the two World Wars, but he didn’t take part in them, he preferred to take on a neutral attitude towards this war conflict. When the first World War broke out, he moved to Zurich, where he devoted himself to literature. Despite his neutral It is a collection of 15 short stories. The collection opens with a group of stories concerning childhood. The other groups, advancing in time and expanding in scope, concern the middle years of characters and their social, political or religious affairs. Joyce, being a Modernist novelist, had an opposing behaviour towards the developments in civilisation. As a matter of fact, Dublin → is a place where true feeling and compassion for others do not exist, where cruelty and selfishness lie just below the surface. → He also chose Dublin because “that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis”. → Dublin stands for any modern city. The short stories are divided into 4 groups: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life, arranged in this order. The first story is “The Sisters”: The protagonist is a priest, who is physically paralyzed (it actually stands for his moral paralysis). At a certain point he broke a chalice and the breaking of it drove him mad →This because religion was associated in his mind with superstition, religion let off any spiritual content. There is a circularity in this collection: the first story opens with a priest, Father Flynn while the last one has Gabriel as the protagonist and he is a priest of art. His faith in art is stronger than Father Flynn’s in religion. That's why Gabriel can aspire to salvation. → In fact The Dead is not only the longest and most complicated story in the collection, it is also the most optimistic one →at the end of the story through the 2 epiphanies, Gabriel overcomes his moral paralysis, his egotism and egocentrism, to become part of the large community of the living and the dead, whom the snow covers with the same whiteness. The characters in Dublin all show a moral and spiritual paralysis, inertia. They want to escape from a confining environment but they are unable to break the bonds with their family or their world. Joyce felt that a moral and spiritual paralysis was at the roots of both Ireland and Dublin’s problem. This paralysis influenced and was influenced by the religious, political, social, cultural environment. One of the main themes is the failure to find a way out of paralysis  The paralysis of conscience and unconsciousness that is epiphanized in all of the stories. The paralysis prevents any psychological or intellectual development. CHILDHOOD The Sisters, An Encounter, Araby ADOLESCENCE Eveline, After the Race, Two Gallants, The Boarding House MATURITY A Little Cloud, Counterparts, Clay, A Painful Case PUBLIC LIFE Ivy Day in the Committee Room, a Mother, Grace, The Dead A novel is different to a short story bc of the length, unity of action, and limited number of characters In contrast to the theme of paralysis is the desire to escape, deriving from a sense of claustrophobia → caused by a sense of suffocation that each character experiences but they are too weak. They lack courage, determination to persist in their decision to leave, so they passively accept their life. The description is very realistic with lots of details. The use of realism is mixed with symbolism → since external details generally have a deeper meaning. The name of certain objects is carefully chosen and emerges from the naturalistic context in which they are placed. For example, the street organ in Eveline takes on a symbolic meaning. It points out the general disharmony of Eveline's family, where the dead mother was a victim of the aggressive father and Eveline now shares the same destiny. We can found religious symbolism → like the holy chalice which is mysteriously broken and is crucial to the real meaning of The Sisters. Even colour symbolism is widely employed in the collection: brown, grey and yellow frequently suggest the atmosphere of despair and paralysis. His style in Dubliners is characterised by two distinct elements: 2. the interior monologue 3. patterned repetition of images, that is, chiasmus. In the first three short stories, which make up the childhood section, Joyce employs a first-person narrator, who remains nameless and not identified. It may be the same little boy for each of them, but it is not certain. This narrator describes events from the point of view of the young boy; this allows the reader to penetrate the boy's mind and to understand him better. For the other 12 stories a third-person narrator is employed: he often shares a particular character's perspective and tends to reflect the language and the sensitivity of the person who is being described. The narrator tends to disappear in the interior monologue, in the form of free indirect speech: the protagonist's pure thoughts are introduced without any reporting verbs, which implies the disappearance of the narrator from the text. This allows the reader to acquire direct knowledge of the character's mind. The syntactical structure maintains exclamations, questions, repetitions, interjections and exaggerations. The language of Dubliners appears simple, objective and neutral. It is always adapted to the characters according to their age, social class and role. → Chiasmus can create melodic Direct thought→ he wondered:”Does she still love me?” Indirect thought→ he wondered if she still loved him Free indirect speech→”Did she still love him?” effects, as in the final sentence of The Dead. In fact, the final paragraph is often considered one of the most beautiful in 20th-century literature. It is a short story belonging to the second group, adolescence → even though Eveline is not an adolescent, since she is over 19 but she reveals psychological immaturity. Eveline sits at the window of her living room at home and looks out onto the street. She thinks about her childhood, when she played with other children in a field on which new houses were built. She remembers her abusive father with whom she is still living, and she starts thinking about leaving her hometown and her job at the shop. Eveline has two options: she could remain at home or leave Dublin with her lover, Frank, who is a sailor. He wants to marry her and live in Buenos Aires → symbolism of the name, it refers to her new better life as a respected wife. Eveline has already agreed to leave with him in secret. She thinks of Frank’s courtship that was not approved by her father, who even argued with him at a certain point. Eveline holds two letters, one to her father and one to her brother Harry. She starts recalling her old family life, when her mother was alive she made her promise to try and keep their family together. She shows her indecisiveness: she lists the pros and cons, because at home she would have food and a roof even though she would have to work hard. The sound of a street organ reminds her of her mother’s death and she remembers her uneventful, sad life, suddenly changing her mind and wanting to escape. At the end of the story she somehow changes her mind about him, thinking that her father is not so bad, and at the docks in Dublin, Eveline waits in a crowd to board the ship with Frank. She is overwhelmed and worried, and prays to God for direction. When the boat arrives and Frank encourages her to accompany him, she refuses. She holds the barrier as he shouts at her to go with him. Eveline remains on the land, motionless and emotionless. It is evening, and Eveline is in her house in the living room, she thinks about her familiar objects. This is the present of the narration, that is given by the simple past. Instead, when she thinks about her past, it uses the past perfect. Her thoughts about the future are rendered by “she would be, the world would treat her with respect…” The story opens in medias res, the antecedents to the story are provided by the characters thoughts, which pass from present, past and future. Eveline is sitting in her living room by the window, watching outside the window people who are going home and then she starts thinking about her past, when she used to play in a field with her friends and brothers. A field where now there were houses. She thinks about the fact her mother was alive, her father was not so bad, but now she was going to leave home, so she also thinks about her future life, and while sitting by the window her thoughts wander from present, past and future but they are triggered by external stimuli. Again, sitting at his desk in the King’s Inn →a building for housing law offices → he realises how quickly time has passed and how important became his friend on the London Press. As he watches outside his window, he sees old men on benches and children screaming in the streets, he thinks of life and he becomes sad. He feels a sense of melancholy, thinking how useless it is to fight against destiny. Little Chandler begins to reflect on his own career as a writer. Though he works as a clerk, Little Chandler aspires to be a poet → a writer whose material is human emotion, not drudgery. Little Chandler dejectedly accepts that such aspirations will never materialise. He then remembers the many books of poetry on his shelves, that due to his shyness he was never able to read out loud, not even to his wife. Little Chandler leaves work and walks to the bar where the men agreed to meet and he feels present in the moment. Chandler has never been in Corless’, but he knew it was one of Dublin 's most cosmopolitan bars. As he turns to Capel Street he remembers Ignatius Gallagher from eight years ago (flashback), who impressed everyone in spite of himself, and he thinks of one of his sayings. He feels superior to know someone like Ignatius. As he recollects his memories, he actually states in his mind that the only way to success was to leave Dublin forever. When he sees the poor stunted houses down the river in Grattan Bridge, he wonders whether he could write a poem to express his pity and emotions and he hopes that Gallagher might put his poetry on a newspaper (he at first wants to ask his friend this favour, but then he forgets). His moment of daydreaming turns into frustration; he knew he had so many moods and impressions to express in verse, but he gave it up when he got married and he was too afraid to try, blaming his dominant melancholy he felt within him. He thinks about his possible career as a poet of the Celtic school and envisions himself lauded by English critics, often to the extent that he mythologizes himself. In the bar, Little Chandler and Gallaher talk about foreign cities, marriage, and the future. Little Chandler is surprised to see Gallaher’s unhealthy pallor and thinning hair, which Gallaher blames on the stress of press life. Throughout the conversation, during which the men consume three glasses of whiskey and smoke two cigars. Little Chandler simultaneously despises and admires Gallaher’s rude manners and tales of foreign cities. He is displeased with Gallaher’s presumptuous way of addressing others and wonders about the immorality of a place like Paris with its dance halls. At the same time, he envies Gallaher’s worldliness and experience. Little Chandler has settled down with a wife and has a son. When he himself becomes the subject of conversation, he is uneasy and blushes. He manages to invite Gallaher to visit his home and meet his family that evening, but Gallaher explains that he has another appointment and must leave the bar soon. The men have their final drink together, and the conversation returns to and ends with Gallaher and his bachelorhood. When Little Chandler insists that Gallaher will one day marry, the journalist scoffs at the prospect, claiming that if he does so he will marry rich, but as it stands he is content to please himself with many women rather than become bored with one. Gallagher’s words influence him so much that when he comes home he starts to feel a dull resentment against his life: he wants to leave his wife and go to London to live bravely like his friend. He feels irritated and repelled by his wife and her innocent and pure eyes, that were completely different from the dark Oriental eyes full of passion described by Gallagher. He wishes to write a book that could open the way for him. He starts to read a volume of Byron’s poems and feeling the rhythm he understands how melancholy it is and he wonders to write like that. The child begins to cry. He tries to read the next lines but the cry grows keener. He can’t help but feel like a prisoner for life and he screams at his own baby to stop crying. His wife enters the room and comforts the baby. Little Chandler feels guilty and tears of remorse start in his eyes. • Little Chandler: he is described by the narrator in the 2 paragraph, is so called because of his stature (small, fragile), he’s a calm and delicate looking man aged 30, with fair hair and moustache. He’s a clerk with a shy and poetic temperament (poetry is his great interest). He’s married with one baby. Chandler strongly feels the desire to escape from his uneventful life, he considers himself superior to his fellow citizens and he acutely feels the contrast between his own life and his friend’s life and it seems to him unjust. Little Chandler is responsible for his frustrated life because he has lacked the courage to leave Ireland and follow his literary vocation, but he is also a victim since he has found an inadequate woman who doesn’t love him and because he has enough sense of responsibility to remain and take care of his family even though this means giving up his ambitions. In the gallery of Dubliners, Little Chandler is different from the other male characters (except for Gabriel Conroy) because of his intellectual interests and of his sensibility which makes him feel remorseful when he is unfair. • Gallaher: he is about 30, he has got blue eyes and very short hair; he is bold and successful with a brilliant personality. He is single and women are one of his main interests along with money and career. He is a journalist in London. His speech is full of idioms or slang, foreign words and imperatives which illustrate his superficial vision of life and his patronising attitude towards both Little Chandler and Ireland. Gallaher is his inferior in birth and education, Chandler is sure he could do everything better than Gallaher While dreaming of a poetic career that may provide an escape for Little Chandler, his work and the problems he has at home are like obstacles to his dreams overwhelming him. Like other characters in Dubliners, Little Chandler experiences an epiphany looking at a picture of his wife; at that moment, Little Chandler sees the life he leads and briefly questions it. In this story the climax corresponds to the epiphany which occurs when he has to take care of his child: at this point his frustration reaches the highest point bc the baby begins to cry and sob so much that he fears he might die. The epiphany reveals to him that he’s selfish but also a prisoner of his situation (“he was a prisoner for life”, a life without hopes or faith ). This story is connected with the sin of ENVY since Little Chandler is envious of his friend’s career, his love affairs, his travels and his freedom (he has a family and he can’t do the same things Gallagher does. The theme of escape ( dream of living abroad ) is represented under 2 aspects: of aspiration for Little Chandler and of realisation for Gallaher. Nevertheless the realisation of the escape is not completely positive, because Gallaher, in spite of his escape, is not a better man than Chandler, he has become vulgar in manners and seems to have worsened his natural tendencies. Little Chandler is suffocated by his family duties, by his job, his house and by Dublin. Claustrophobia in this story takes the form of the impossibility for him to follow his literary vocation. In "A Little Cloud" the ending is open since we don’t know whether this experience will make him a more responsible man or a more resigned one. It is also a turning point in the collection, because it implies that, contrary to what so many of the book's characters believe, going away from Ireland is not necessarily the solution to their problems. Finally, the conclusion of "A Little Cloud," in which Little Chandler returns dissatisfied to his family and shouts at his crying child, will be brutally reiterated in the ending of the next story, "Counterparts." Therefore the ending is open, since the story continues on the next one, leaving the readers on a cliffhanger. The story can be divided into:  Introduction (the first paragraphs)  Development (meeting with Mrs Sinico and their appointments)  Climax (when he is reading the news)  epiphany and the ending James Duffy is a bank cashier who lives in a modest and tidy house just outside Dublin. He spends his days reading and follows a monotonous routine without social interactions: every day he eats the same meals at the same cafe. He enjoys reading and occasionally attends the opera. One evening he meets Mrs. Sinico at a concert downtown, a married woman with a daughter. He finds her charming and sensitive, and soon they start meeting regularly. Since Mr Sinico is the Captain of a boat, he’s usually away from home, so Mrs Sinico often invites him to her house, where they spend hours talking (mainly about music). The days pass and they grow close emotionally. Thanks to her, Mr Duffy now starts to abandon his state of isolation from the world. However, one evening she takes his hand and places it on her cheek. Mr Duffy is deeply bothered, as he thinks she has misinterpreted his intentions. As a result, he avoids her for a week, and eventually accepts to see her, only to declare to her his aim to cut off the relationship. 4 years later Mr Duffy is back to his routine. While reading the newspaper he notices an article called “a painful case”. It involves Mrs Sinico, who has been hit by a train, probably willingly. Emily Sinico’s death is described in detail, just as part of the investigation.He discovers that she had started drinking heavily and probably died due to heart failure, rather than the knock itself. He feels sickened by the words choice of the journalist, but deeply he’s angry with her. He reasons that she was unsuitable to live and that he was a fool for thinking so highly of her. At first, he’s disgusted, as he had revealed his secrets to such an irresponsible woman, and he feels proud for having broken up with her given the way she has just died; then he went to drink some hot punch. He’s absent-minded and lost in thought at the same time, starting to feel guilty. He sympathises with her solitude and isn’t sure whether anyone will remember him once he’s dead. He feels her presence close to him in the darkness of the night, realising that maybe her death was his fault. He therefore starts to feel a deep remorse for having lost the only possibility to love, and at the end he feels paralysed in his state of eternal loneliness. The circular narrative technique represents the life that leads Mr Duffy full of routines. These routines are the reason why he is denied from experiencing true relationships. The ending is closed because there is the conclusion: Mr Duffy felt alone and could hear nothing. The conclusion speaks for itself and doesn’t leave room for interpretation. Duffy’s epiphany is triggered by the sight of the couples lying in the park; it makes him realise how lonely and useless his life has been: an “adventureless tale”. He has escaped from the only adventure of his life because he thought it would offend the “rectitude of his life”; now he comes to realise that it was only his incapacity to live. He’s remorseful: he has refused her love and sentenced her to a life of sadness and a shameful death. He’s alone as well, and he’s the one to blame: only the silence of the late night accompanies him on his walk back home. • Moral paralysis: Mr. Duffy’s personal story conforms to the general atmosphere of Dublin, since he will never be able to change his life for the better. • Theme of escape: it is illustrated by Mrs Sinico. It is represented in negative terms, in fact she had tried to escape from her loneliness through a semi-clandestine love affair. When this hope had faded, she escaped from disappointment through alcohol. • The story is connected with the sin of LAZINESS This is the last story and it summarizes themes and motifs of the other 14 stories of the collection, but it functions more as an epilogue. It also anticipates Joyce's move away from the short story → toward the novel. Although it was a late addition, it can be considered Joyce's first masterpiece. → in fact it’s one of the most important and complicated stories of the collection. It is a climax of the all collection → it tells with many of the themes dealt in the previous stories. The story opens in medias res. Gabriel arrives at the annual Christmas party given by his aunts Julia and Kate Morkan, and he is the most important guest. The short story may be divided into 5 steps: the arrival of the guests with dances and the concert, the dinner, the guests taking leave, the hotel room and the conclusion with Gabriel's epiphany. 1) The arrival of the guests with dances and the concert. The narrator introduces The Morkan sisters (Kate and Julia ),Mary Jane (their niece) and Lily (the caretaker's daughter), they belong to the lower middle class since they work to earn their living,but they like to live comfortably and eating well. Gabriel (the son of their elder dead sister Ellen) arrives late with Gretta. Lily is the first to approach Gabriel and with her bitter answer about men she mortified Gabriel's self pleasure.Then while Gabriel was going through his speech, the stamping and shuffling of feet reminded him of the guests' lower culture.He passes from uneasiness to fear he would make himself ridiculous by quoting R. Browning and make them think he was showing off to end with the fear he would not be adequate to his task (introspective description of Gabriel's thoughts). Next, while talking to aunt Kate, Gretta makes fun of Gabriel’s exaggerated anxiety about his family ( episode of the goloshes ).Before Freddy Malins arrives, the aunts fear he might turn up drunk as usual,so provoking scandal at the party;Gabriel is sent down to welcome Freddy who is tipsy.Mr. Browne is another guest who drinks too much,he invites some ladies to drink something strong but then he offers lemonade, while he drinks whisky telling them,as a joke, it is his doctor's order. Mr. D’Arcy, the tenor who is very praised in Dublin arrives. While M.Jane is playing the piano, Gabriel looks around the room,he observes 2 pictures and observing them memories connected with his mother reemerge. Ellen was considered the brain carrier, she had encouraged Gabriel and his brother to study hard, but she had always opposed Gabriel’s' marriage with Gretta. During the dances,Gabriel is partnered with Miss Ivors who accuses him of being a supporter of the British because he writes reviews for an English newspaper(to be a west briton), Gabiel tries to defend himself saying he saw nothing political in writing reviews of books, she also asks him why he spent his holidays in Europe and not in Ireland ,he justifies himself saying that he needed to keep in touch with the language (English not Irish). At the end of their conversation Gabiel, feels a mixture of annoyance and contempt to Miss ivors; he also gets annoyed with Gretta because it seems to him that she is siding with Miss Ivors against him. Miss lvors is different from the other guests because she is not wearing an evening dress and she is a frank mannered and talkative woman,she also leaves before the dinner and when she leaves she speaks in irish. He decides to take his revenge on her during the speech, by quoting the present young generations in negative terms. The young generation is well educated but it lacks a fundamental quality= hospitality. With the episode of Mrs. Ivors , Joyce wants to emphasise that English colonisation imposed the English language and culture, not just exploitation. Julia's song ,Arrayed for the Bridal,is very appreciated by all the guests(an anticipation of her death) 2) The dinner The dinner is divided into 3 courses: The dinner takes on an important symbolic meaning= it is for Gabriel a last supper preceding the destruction of his ego and his reunion with mankind. Instead the table (there is a detailed description of it) with its large quantity of food symbolises Irish hospitality. • At the end of the first course there is a discussion on music, M.Jane and Mr Browne express regret for the past and its great opera singers, Mr. d Arcy defends modern singers instead. The Tenor is another guest who feels uneasy among the others because he is not interested in the past nor in Dublin, his concern is the continent and the present. • After the second course there is a discussion on the monks during which Mt Browne ( protestant ) expresses his astonishment at the existence of monks in monasteries that never spoke and slept in their coffins instead of beds. M Jane is the voice of catholicism and says that the coffin was to remind them of their last end (destiny is death ) • The third verbal event is Gabriel's speech after the 3 course .He has decided not to mention Browning, so he speaks about: 1) Irish hospitality, represented by his aunts, the only typical Irish virtue to which he pays homage, a quality Miss Ivors and the present, young generation do not possess 2) past versus present,but the latter is worse 3) sad memories (the dead ) 4) the 3 Graces of Dublin musical world 5) Paris,the Trojan requested to choose among 3 deities, in the same way Gabriel is requested to choose the best among the 3 graces, but given the impossibility to choose he proposes a toast, to drink to their health, wealth and long life. 3) The guests one by one are taking leave In the hall Gabriel tells the guests the story of Patrick Morkan's horse, which used to work in a mill where he would walking round and round to drive the mill; one day Mr. Morkan went to a military parade in the park with his horse, but as soon as the horse approached the statue of king Billy( William of Orange) sitting on his horse, it began to walk around it and nobody was able to understand if the horse fell in love at sight with the king's horse or if it thought it was back again in the mill. The story was very appreciated and everyone understood it. → it represents Ireland's inconclusive destiny (paralysis of Dublin's life revolving around British rulers) and it also symbolises the frustration of Gabriel's literary aspirations. While still in the hall, Gabriel sees his wife upstairs listening to something: it was an Irish song sung by the tenor, The Lass Of Aughrim. Then, while walking in the street to take a cab to their hotel room, Gabriel goes through memories of his past with Gretta, he considers his marriage moderately happy. After that while passing in front of the statue of Daniel O'Connell, an Irish patriot, Gabiel, waves his hand→ this is not contradictory with his declared antinationalism, he is in a particular state of mind, he has just recalled his honeymoon, so he is happy and excited. 4) the hotel room In the hotel room Gabriel is consumed with physical passion, whereas Gretta looks serious and very tired, so he asks her what she is thinking about and she bursts into tears. Then she tells him the story of Michael → a boy who was deeply in love with her when she lived in Galway → the story of Michael is contrasted with Gabriel’s emotional aridity and is also the symbol of what we ignore in other people's life. Gabriel shows his jealousy using irony, next he feels humiliated by the failure of his irony when Gretta tells him Michael is dead. Finally looking at himself in the mirror, he sees himself as a ridiculous and silly person, like a puppet for his aunts (introspective description of Gabriel). 5) and the conclusion with Gabriel's epiphany Gabriel passes from a different range of feelings and finally achieves a superior understanding of human destiny. • First he compares his love to Michael's and realises he has never been able of such love. • Then he imagines to see Micheal and the many human beings that are dead • Next he feels his own identity fade out to become part of the vast community of the living and the dead whom the snow covers with the same whiteness.