Book Review: 'Dubliners' by James Joyce as a Masterclass in Short Fiction

Dubliners was published in 1914, though most of it was written a decade earlier, when James Joyce was in his early twenties and struggling to get a book past publishers who found it indecent, unpatriotic or simply too plain. Fifteen stories, arranged from childhood through to public life, all set in a city he had already left. Very little happens in most of them. A boy waits for a girl who never comes out. A woman stands at a window and cannot board a boat. A man misses his chance, his train, or his point.

That plainness is the trick, and it is why the collection still rewards a writer's attention more than almost any other in the language. Read Dubliners with a pen in hand and you start to see how much can be built out of a room, a conversation, a refusal and a fall of snow.

A Structure You Feel Before You Can Name It

Joyce never printed section headings, but the arrangement is deliberate. The first three stories — The Sisters, An Encounter, Araby — belong to childhood. Then come the adolescent pieces: Eveline, After the Race, Two Gallants, The Boarding House. Maturity follows with A Little Cloud, Counterparts, Clay and A Painful Case, and public life closes the sequence with Ivy Day in the Committee Room, A Mother and Grace. Then The Dead arrives as a coda, longer and warmer than anything before it.

The effect is a portrait assembled from angles. No frame narrative, no recurring cast, no authorial summary — just fifteen lives at different stages, gathering weight because of the order they arrive in. If you are putting a collection together, that is a lesson worth copying: sequence creates the story that individual stories cannot.

The Epiphany, and How Not to Announce It

Joyce used the word epiphany in his early manuscript Stephen Hero to describe a sudden showing-forth, a moment when something ordinary reveals itself. In Dubliners those moments are almost never explained.

In Eveline, the revelation is physical: her hands grip the iron railing at the dock and she cannot move. In Clay, Maria touches the clay in the Halloween game and the neighbours quietly rearrange the saucers so she will not be upset — the cruelty and the kindness sit in the same gesture. In A Little Cloud, Chandler's self-pity collapses into the sound of his own child crying. In Araby, the boy stands in a half-dark bazaar and sees himself as "a creature driven and derided by vanity". The naming is short, and it comes after the detail: the shuttered stalls, the coins counted in his hand, the two men flirting by the urn.

The technique is portable. Give the reader the object first — the railing, the clay, the empty hall — and let the recognition arrive on its own. Resist the sentence that begins "She realised that…". Joyce almost never writes it, and his stories are stronger for the absence.

Dublin as Pressure, Not Backdrop

Joyce said he wanted to write a chapter of the moral history of his country and chose Dublin because the city seemed to him the centre of paralysis. You can feel that everywhere. The streets are named — North Richmond Street, Usher's Island, the Liffey, Grafton Street — and the weather is constant: drizzle, dusk, gaslight, snow. The boy in The Sisters turns over the words paralysis, gnomon and simony as if they were holy and slightly dangerous.

Note how the city applies pressure rather than supplying scenery. Rooms are small. Money is short. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing. That pressure is what makes a quiet decision feel enormous. Choose a setting you know down to the pavement level, name its streets, and your characters will start behaving with the caution of people who cannot simply leave.

A Style of "Scrupulous Meanness"

Joyce described his own prose in a letter to his publisher as "a style of scrupulous meanness", and the phrase is exact. Adjectives are rationed. Dialogue does the work of exposition. Nobody explains the joke. The sentences are short and do a job, which is why the stories read quickly and then sit with you for days.

The Dead is the exception, and its release is earned by everything before it. After fourteen stories of restraint, the final paragraphs are allowed to open out:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

That is what a change of register can do when it has been withheld for two hundred pages.

What to Steal, and How to Use It

• Order for accumulation. Put your smallest story first and your most expansive last. Readers remember shape.
• Let objects carry feeling. A coin, a prayer book, a plate of biscuits. Naming the emotion is usually the weaker choice.
• Withhold the explanation. If a character behaves badly, show the behaviour twice and trust the reader to join the dots.
• End smaller than expected. Many Dubliners stories close on a gesture or an image rather than a resolution. Try it in a draft you are stuck on.
• Write the city into the story. Specific place names make fiction sound like testimony.
• Rewrite for rhythm. Read each paragraph aloud. If a sentence is there for decoration, cut it.

An Influence That Keeps Working

Before Dubliners, the short story often leaned on a twist or a tall tale. Afterwards, it became possible to build one out of an ordinary evening and a failed plan. The plain-style realism that runs through twentieth-century short fiction — Hemingway's early stories, Katherine Mansfield's, Raymond Carver's — owes something to the book, and Irish writers from Frank O'Connor and John McGahern to Anne Enright and Colm Tóibín have worked in its shadow. Any story that ends on weather is, knowingly or not, answering The Dead.

How to Read It as a Writer

Read one story a night, in order, and keep a notebook beside you. Mark the paragraph where the story turns — it is usually later than you think, and quieter than you remember. Copy one paragraph out by hand to feel how the sentences are jointed. Then write a one-page imitation: same length, same restraint, your own street. You will learn more from that exercise than from a shelf of craft manuals.

Dubliners is not a museum piece and it is not difficult. It is short, sharp, funny in places and quietly brutal in others, and it repays the kind of reading that asks how the thing was made. Fifteen stories. One city. A masterclass hiding in plain sight.

Photo: DariuszSankowski / Pixabay