Status Updates From Dubliners

“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.

Eveline

`Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from.`

`It was hard work - a hard life - but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.`