Astonied in Dublin: An Analogy of the Relationships in James Joyce's Dubliners "Eveline" and "A Painful Case"

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2010 im Fachbereich Anglistik - Literatur, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: James Joyce's book Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories and, as the name already tells, they are about the lives of people living in Dublin. The novellas are about men and women of every age. In the book are different stages of life. The story "Eveline" is a childhood story. The story "A Painful Case" is an adulthood story. Terence Brown describes the work "as a book of churches" (Brown XXX). For Joyce, church and faith are very important, and Dublin and its citizens are characterized by the Christian religion. Although the stories are all self-contained, the book can be read as a whole. As the reader will notice by reading there are many links between the different stories and they take place in the same city -Dublin. When James Joyce wrote the book, he had already left Ireland for France in order to study medicine. This could be a possible hint to why the book can, on the one hand, be seen as a book about Dubliners by a Dubliner but, on the other hand, it can be also seen as a book about Dublin from an outside perspective. David G. Wright emphasises that Dubliners shows how Joyce himself could have become if he had stayed in the capital of Ireland (Wright 14). Therefore, the book can be seen as an explanation and if there has to be one, as an apology for James Joyce, why he decided to leave Ireland. As Andrew Gibson states, the paralysis of the lives of the Dubliners, which is shown by Joyce, is "post-catastrophic" (Gibson 76), referring to the famine that brought many Irish into poverty.
This paper takes a closer look at the two stories "Eveline" and "A Painful Case". The autobiographical aspect becomes obvious because David G. Wright writes that the main characters of these two stories are created after the model of James Joyce's siblings Margaret and Stanislaus (Wright 22/23). Furthermore, as it will be examined in this paper, Dubliners relates Joyce's own feelings about Dublin. Eveline tries to flee from Dublin and her family, unlike Mr. Duffy, the main character of "A Painful Case", who is a loner and who is content to remain just where and how he is..