Astonied in Dublin

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). Fur