Status Updates From Dubliners (Reading Classics)

“After the Race”

Jimmy is a fortunate young man who basks in the afterglow of a successful car race but his desire to be part of the cosmopolitan happening of the after party is a Pyrrhic endeavor, revealing that he is out of his depth among the reveling elite, losing heavily at a card game whose main winner is—you guessed it—the token Englishman.

“Eveline”

Joyce’s portrait of Irish stagnation now paints a young woman who wants to escape the spiral by emigrating to Buenos Aires with her sailor beau but for a complicated morass of reasons finds herself unable to do so when pull comes to yank. The dichotomies of desire, duty, and despair are an echo of her own mother’s descent into delirium.

“Araby”

Joyce is masterful in crafting stories that are just as entrenched in Irish metaphor as they are relatable in and of themselves. In this case, a young boy desperately in love with his friend’s (older?) sister goes to a bazaar with the intent to buy something for her because she cannot go. The bazaar is almost wound down by the time he gets there, though, and he is consumed with impotent anger.

“An Encounter”

I remember this story! Two of three boys play truant from school, the third one flakes out, and they have an unfulfilling adventure that eventually puts them in the path of a creepy old man who does something that the narrator desperately does not look at. It seems like such an amusing little vignette at first, with Joyce talking about playing Indians and reading adventure pulps.

“The Sisters”

A man reflects on the time when Father Flynn, a major sympathetic in the life of his young self, died. There are a lot of jabs at the Catholicism that Joyce resented, from the excellently timed “God have mercy on his soul” to the notion that Flynn’s faith precipitated a nervous breakdown that permanently affected his health, leading to his decline and death,

“Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition”

Heartbreaking. My poor mother.