Dubliners

Okay so I just read Dubliners a few days ago and I'm wondering if I just didn't get it. The prose was all good and some of the stories were interesting and pleasantly melancholic, but I felt like it wasn't as good as I expected it to be considering how it's revered here. Many of the stories were uninteresting and comprised of people talking in a room. My favorite stories were A Little Cloud, Eveline, and a Painful Case. My least favorite were Ivy Day in the Committee Room and Clay. I understand that it's suppose to be a look into the lives of the Irish citizens of Dublin but I found it a bit of a chore to read.

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you probably should've gotten an annotated copy. The stories seem unimpressive but over time you'll notice them lodged in your mind, recurring. A Little Cloud, A Painful Case, and Araby come to mind. Dubliners is about paralysis and disillusion. Portrait of the Artist is about youthful epiphany that things must be sacramentalized in order to have meaning. Ulysses, well, that's another post

and Finnegans?

same value as Pound's Cantos: staggeringly genius but simply unreadable

The best you can do is take a joyce class.

How is anyone's favorite story from this not The Dead?

Because hes not a sheep who parrots those he considers smart. You're fine OP. its really dense stuff

Yeah The Dead was alright but I don't know why people say it's the unequivocal "best" story. I meant to say this in the OP but I do plan on reading it again to see if my feelings change about it.
Yeah, i think flipping back every few lines to be told obvious things like what a catacomb is or who O'Connell was to pointless things to what street leads where.

it sounds you didn't understand the collection. it's not supposed to be realism. Try Zola or Flaubert

The stories that were your least favorite are the ones that require the most cultural background to understand, so it's no surprise that they failed to work for you. In general, though, the stories in Dubliners work in subtle ways. They often turn on a quiet event that has enormous implications. You may get more out of the stories the next time you read them.

I don't know what makes you think I thought it was suppose to be realism.
I've actually studied Irish history between 1829 to 1914, so I knew a good deal, my father's even Irish. But I didn't feel particularly compelled by what was being said.

I'd come back to this book later, I was the same way but once you get a few more books under your belt youll see how good this shit is

Read it in high school, probably 12+ years ago. I went in with no understanding of its reputation, I couldn't put it down. I still have vivid memories of the imagery that was conveyed to me. Sometimes it almost feels like they were my own direct experiences.

>The stories seem unimpressive but over time you'll notice them lodged in your mind, recurring.
God I'm honestly shocked at how accurate this is. "Recurring" is a good way of putting it, personally I could almost describe them as flashbacks or something though.

I don't normally come to Yea Forums so I don't know if this is commonly said about Dubliners, but I'm really fucking surprsied. You just nailed my own experience.

Yeah, the man you're replying to is right, Joyce takes re-reading... that simple. You're already on the boat, so you might as well

I remember when I finished Araby the first time, in 7th grade, and came to the final line:

>Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

How perfectly it described my life at that point and time. It took my breath away. I was obsessed with both 'purity' and impressing women even though I was quite ugly and naive. Reading this line was like a stomach punch. Truly an epiphany moment, the sacramental, the breaking in of the greater into the mundane, transubstantiation. Joyce is deeply Catholic and so was I... it's hard to describe the effect reading James Joyce had on me at such a young age.

it's not even the third best

how many is a few more?

Because the only good part is the last paragraph

Do they actually have those?

sounds a bit pretentious but here goes

I'm irish but I feel Dubliners is one of those books you won't 100% 'get' unless you're from the country of origin. There's just a way Joyce writes and captures the irish psyche that no other irish writer has done. The first story from Dubliners (3 sisters) is a perfect example- a wake with a person that no one particularly cares about, but everyone is having small pointless chats over tea. he just captures the absolute fucking misery of this kip really well (and he didn't even live here for decades)

I don’t find it pretentious. So you feel that some Irish psyche from Joyce’s era still exists pretty much unchanged among Irish people today? I hear something similar from Russians as well and I find it extremely interesting. I’m from Canada and I’ve often felt that there isn’t any real distinctive Canadian culture, at least not where I’m from specifically. Always makes me wonder if I’m missing out on something.

I'm in the same boat, "A Painful Case" was superb, one of the best short stories I've read, but almost all the others were just "meh"

This. It just so happens the last paragraph is one of the greatest in the english language. Nice digits.

He wrote it when he was like 20 or something, it just didn't get published for years