Reviews

Dubliners by James Joyce

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i0n4's review against another edition

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medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character

4.0

lelia_t's review

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4.0

I preface every review of short stories by saying I’m not a good short story reader. Most make me tense while delivering only a key-hole vision of the narrator’s experience. Most of the stories in Dubliners fit this pattern and I can’t say I relished reading them. The exception is The Dead, a story I’d read in high school and remember as being my introduction to the transcendent beauty that can be found in prose. I found it just as beautiful this time around, but having lived a little more I appreciated the way Joyce takes us from the small worries and social niceties of a party to the stirrings of Gabriel’s passion for his wife and then to a moment of being, or spot of time, where his vision opens to include all the living and the dead in Ireland. It’s a beautiful story that seems almost a blessing on the lives of all the characters we’ve caught glimpses of in the previous stories.

isabeldnnt's review

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challenging emotional inspiring reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? N/A
Loveable characters? N/A
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

3.5

casspro's review

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2.0

There were some stories in this collection that I felt were so lovely and sad. Eveline, Araby, and Little Cloud were some of my favorites. But the majority of the stories seemed very stereotypical of the "drunken and sad, fighting Irish". I've read other Irish writers, and while they also have this sense of melancholy, I don't remember them to have this sense of slow motion. Joyce has been viewed as the classic Irish writer, so it's possible the stereotypes are just the scope we as modern readers apply to the stories. Joyce wrote what he knew, but over the years those lives became tropes. Which may be sadder than the actual stories themselves.