一个青年艺术家的画像

When Joyce began writing his collection, he was short of money and under multiple economical difficulties. Accordingly, he was paid for each finished and submitted story separately by the journal that had undertaken the task of their publication. The little money he had made in the process allowed him to immigrate and thus flee this state of penury, but the stories themselves bore nevertheless the mark of that strain for cash. The eponymous heroine of Eveline, for one, is constantly worried out of her wits by the prospect of want and destitution. Although, the bulk of Joyce's work suggests that economic marginality affects women and children the most, his stories convey at the same time the notion that the lack of money often comes as a blow to masculinity. The book reflects Joyce's rejection of the viewpoint attributing value to art on the basis of religious or moral ideals. While writing his stories, the author had set about the task of purging the Irish imagination of its toxins and obsolete Romanticism. Accordingly, Dubliners is a study in Realism understood to have a moral stance. Its atmosphere quite resembles [a:T.S. Eliot|18540|T.S. Eliot|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1612500008p2/18540.jpg]'s [b:The Waste Land|34080|The Waste Land|T.S. Eliot|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1597549396l/34080._SY75_.jpg|389834]. Its stories study human incapacities and self-replicating unhappiness. Eveline, for instance, tells the story of a young woman who had had the opportunity to leave her old life of misery behind and start anew with her man, but could not bring herself to cut the ties. A Painful Case is another example studying the progress and life of an old man who flinched from human contact, yet destroyed the only person with whom he could have had a real relationship. Overall, the world of Dubliners is bleak and tough, but Joyce had sketched the lives of his destitute and marginalized characters with the same enthusiasm given to the most distinguished literary heroes and heroines. His ultimate goal was to make art out of the dreary sameness of everyday life. In such an immersion in the task of communicating humanistic views, Joyce had borrowed a term and a concept from the religious realm and established it within the literary sphere, bringing thus the concept of Epiphany to the world of literature.

The book is a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman that follows the development of Stephen Dedalus from early childhood to the beginning of manhood. In terms of composition, it can be read as a symbolic, impressionistic piece, and an ironic treatment of the acute sensitiveness of its focal character. Like earlier novels of personal development including Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, the book begins with a child narrator. But while the earlier specimens of the genre use a sophisticated grammar and a word choice superior to that of a child, Joyce voices the thoughts of an infant in the incomplete and limited language of one using a technique called "colored narrative". This approach emphasizes the inner struggle of Stephen in his attempts to translate his experience into language. The shape of Stephen's young life closely shadows that of Joyce's and conveys his own struggles in a society where artistic expression was doomed to repression and censorship. . Thus, the novel emphasizes the struggles of artists in a restricted society, and deals with such themes as the difficulties of artistic expressions, sexual freedom, and censorship. At the same time, it points out the impact of religious and political strains through Stephen's attempts to free himself from both.