Jesse’s Reviews > Dubliners > Status Update

“A Painful Case”

Mr. Duffy, an intellectual, begins a sort of affair with a married woman, a friendship with an erotic undertone that he is loathe to cross out of his high-mindedness. When things go sour, Duffy undergoes an amazing transformation, from reviling his would-be mistress to being saturated with empathy for her as he finally senses his own profound loneliness.

“Counterparts”

Portrait of a drunk, a man who copes with his spiritual paralysis by drinking on the job (which he has been doing poorly at), binge drinking with his friends, and then beating his helpless children when he goes home in deference to his general impotence. You can almost feel for Farrington at first but as the day goes on you can see the depth of the rut that he’s in.

“A Little Cloud”

Little Chandler is a sensitive man who reconnects with his friend who had gone to London and made something big of himself. He compares their lives and in a moment of weakness while cradling his own child at home he finds himself resenting his wife and baby as part of his stagnation, part of what holds him back from leading the “romantic” life of his friend.

“The Boarding House”

A tiny drama where a fairly well to do man in his 30s is entrapped in a marriage with the daughter of the woman who runs the house he boards at. You get a sense of the calculating motives of everyone at play, even Bob suddenly realizing how Polly’s brother must be in on it as well given how inflamed he was at a different man making a pass at his sister.

“Two Gallants”

A story about two young men who are swaggering around Dublin. The story is about exploitation, but it’s not exactly sexual but financial as the servant Corley is making time with is being grifted for money, and what the notes describe as a considerable sum of money for either them or for that matter the servant woman: a single gold coin.

“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,