Literary Devices in Dubliners
Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Setting
If a New Yorker is from New York, an Angeleno is from Los Angeles, and a Liverpudlian is from Liverpool (file that under "weird but true"), a Dubliner is a denizen of Dublin, Ireland. All that to s...
Narrator Point of View
The first three stories—"The Sisters," "An Encounter," and "Araby"—are told in the first person, but the rest are told in the third person (limited omniscient). Joyce is famous for using a litt...
Genre
When you hear the name James Joyce, the first word that should come to your mind is Modernism. And while his later works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegan's Wake go re...
Tone
If you're looking for one perfect word to describe the tone of Dubliners, you're out of luck. At times, Joyce is best-friend sympathetic towards his characters and their situations, as in "Araby."...
Writing Style
This might sound like a broken record, but there's no single style in Dubliners. What's so amazing about the stories is how many different styles Joyce employs to describe the various walks of life...
What's Up With the Title?
Joyce wrote in a letter to his English publisher that his "intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene." To go one step beyond this, we can...
What's Up With the Ending?
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come f...
Tough-o-Meter
While the plots of the stories in Dubliners are generally easy to follow, and there aren't too many characters in any single story, trying to remember the details of all fifteen stories and fit the...
Trivia
If you ever get to Dublin, and are feeling literary, you can take a walking tour of Dubliners and see the houses and pubs where the stories take place. An audio guide includes readings and perform...
Steaminess Rating
Like any truly good PG movie, there are plenty of references to sex to keep mature audiences giggling without making the innocent blush. You can read "An Encounter" without really knowing that the...
Allusions
Euclid, Elements: "gnomon in the Euclid"(The Sisters.1)Thomas MooreSir Walter ScottLord Lytton: "the poetry of Thomas Moore or the works of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Lytton" (An Encounter.23)Walter...