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Rating: As soon as you finish reading Dubliners, you realize that something in your life has changed. And not just because you have read one of the most undisputed, sublime, and immortal literary peaks of all modern anthologies, but because at the end of the fifteen stories that compose it, you question how much sense it makes to continue viewing reality with the usual simple, too often customary carelessness. The questions you've always asked yourself quietly and learned to silence now emerge vehemently and gain a new dimension. Now you feel understood when you reflect on how fake and artificial life is, on how unfair it is that rules matter more than people, and on how no one cares about the human side of things.
Joyce's message is clear: the values of bourgeois society are anti-human. They confine us to a cardboard existence where our power to choose our destiny is null. Unlike many others, Joyce does not jest about alienation; he prefers to speak directly of death. Here is the harsh truth: the bourgeois thought of our century is death.
Joyce captures with merciless harshness the change in society's values in a modern sense (the book was written between 1904 and 1907), and he does so by focusing not on the downtrodden or the marginalized, but on the average man, the common people who fill the streets and houses of Dublin, his city, every day. The characters he describes are squalid extracts of the early century middle class, blindly moving in the whirlpools of a monotonous, circular, closed existence; they act only within the rules of convention, they cannot choose, they do not understand designs greater than their daily lives, and they feel no passions. They are, in all respects, dead.
The stories widely cover all aspects of social life in Dublin of the time (politics, religion, morals, family), but the theme of death is always present, even when not explicitly addressed. In my view, just three episodes, Eveline, Clay, and The Dead, are enough to cast a macabre shadow over the others and provide an incontrovertible key to interpretation.
The young Eveline, in the eponymous story, faces a difficult choice. Crushed by an unbearable family situation, she has the opportunity to escape to Argentina with her fiancé but fails to seize it. Already folded by the fear of an unknown world to face (thinking of the sea voyage, she imagines herself drowning), she miserably capitulates in front of the guilt she feels towards her deceased mother. The ship departs with only him on board, and Eveline cannot help but extend indefinitely the safety provided by her unhappiness.
In Clay (originally titled Clay) the situation is perhaps even more exasperated. Maria, the protagonist, is not even capable of realizing the heaviness of her condition, so the possibility of a choice does not even present itself to her. Advanced in age but unmarried, she lives a daily life of the same repetitive gestures, surrounded only by the lukewarm affection of acquaintances. Her excessively placid and simple life betrays the bitter truth of a severe existential malaise for which habit serves only as a palliative. Lost in the minutiae of the most banal actions (preparing tea for the women in the nursing home where she works, taking the tram, buying a cake for a party), Maria desperately tries to hide her congenital inability to face real life consciously. It is significant that during a traditional Halloween Eve game, where blindfolded people choose an object symbolizing their destiny, she mistakenly touches a block of clay: the inanimate, soft, and moldable matter is the macabre emblem of her entire existence.
The Dead is the longest and most complex story in the work, as there are many reading levels on which it develops. Here, not only are the worlds of the afterlife and the living in close contact, but they are even inverted. Gabriel, an educated yet mediocre character, collects a series of failures during a family New Year's Eve before witnessing the collapse of the certainties of an entire lifetime. After the party, his wife Gretta melts into tears remembering a poignant song someone played during the evening, which she has linked to a memory: her fiancé from when she was young, Michael, who died prematurely. Gabriel, trapped in the vice of a stale and predictable marriage, cannot help but be unprepared for such a revelation. He does not know how to handle and endure, beyond the jealousy of learning she belonged to another man during her life, the sting of seeing her moved by the memory of a deceased person, aware that he was never able to move her in the same way throughout their entire life together.
His reaction is disordered. He realizes he has never truly possessed his wife's heart, and he feels anger and envy towards Michael, who at least in dying was able where he always failed. The paradox is excruciating: Gabriel, with his life lacking passion, already belongs to the world of the dead, while Michael is still alive in Gretta's memories even after many years since his departure.
After this epiphany, which indeed strikes the reader much more than it strikes the character, the final image of the snow falling on the entire universe, emphasized by the repetitive chiasmus and the alliteration of soft sounds ("His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling"), is the summary of the entire work's meaning. The whiteness of the cold shroud that settles all around unites those present and those past, binding them into a common grip. With this concept of an unparalleled existential paralysis definitively marked, the curtain falls on a dark and presage-filled light.
The sensitivity with which Joyce explores human mechanisms and traces them back to the very source of modern alienation is striking. A fundamental work for understanding an era of which we are, for better or worse, children.
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