Dubliners

Best
The Dead

Worst
Everything else

i hope you are baiting.

>Best
The Dead
An Encounter
Araby (for personal feels reasons)

>Worst
Liked them all desu

I think every single person relates to Araby. How did Joyce do it?

I don't know why it regularly appears towards the bottom of people's ranked Dubliners stories, but Joyce was a master of showing and conveying those childhood emotions to an adult reader

No love for Clay?

He did it so well in the first hundred or so pages of Portrait

I just finished my second read through of Dubliners and After the Race still doesn't stand out to me. I feel the same way about the Boarding House. They are both great little stories though. The only one that I think really fell flat is A Mother

I'm not it was boring as fuck. only good story was the last one

Its first paragraph is epic
>The cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers had gathered in clumps to watch the cars careering homeward and through this channel of poverty and inaction the Continent sped its wealth and industry. Now and again the clumps of people raised the cheer of the gratefully oppressed.

what the fuck is not boring to you then?

michael bay movies probably

Nice taste user, I've got the same rankings except I switched After the Race with Two Gallants

>Favorite
Eveline
Two Gallants
The Dead

Favorites:
>An Encounter
>A Little Cloud
>A Painful Case

Sometimes I feel I'm doomed to either of the fates of the protagonists in those last two. If I choose family I'll feel weighed down and impotent, if I choose solitary life I'll inevitably feel that I've missed out on all that matters.

I totally misunderstood Two Gallants when I read it... felt dumb.

Damn Irish slang I wish I had gotten the Viking Critical Edition like I did for Portrait

Those feels when she left the cake on the train

Post best dubliners feels

>tfw you have to nervously walk around town waiting for your buddy to convince a girl to steal from the woman she works for to determine if you will have enough money to eat

>checked
>not some play on Dublin

>He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became sad. A gentle melancholy took possession of him. He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune, this was the burden of wisdom which the ages had bequeathed to him.

Not too related, but has anyone here read A Portrait of an Artist?

I've been enjoying it, but midway through the book in chapter three there is so much religious dialogue that right now it seems kind of flat and tedious.

Does it stay like this throughout the rest of the book?

the tedium of the religious sections is intended I think, it kind of reflects Stephens true feelings. idk if you've gotten to the sermon yet but even though it's drawn out it belongs

Fuck

I didn't get After The Race, am I missing something? It just seems like some rich faggot goes on a boat with some other faggots and loses money.

That's basically it lad. It's meant to be just some young 20-ish friends enjoy a fun and well deserved evening of splurging hard earned money

His experience at the race and the aftermath was exhilarating--the cheers of the crowd, the adoration of his parents. Enjoying the company of his rich and continental friends he feels different, better than those he came from. But as the revery winds down, he's had too much to drink, he loses his money and he's overcome with the sense that he doesn't measure up to his new companions. This moment of insecurity reflects an anxiety within all of us--nothing is ever really good enough--and that which is inherent to the Irish nature.

A Painful Case is my favourite. Veeky Forums: the short story

Araby works too. As for the time Veeky Forums went to visit other Veeky Forums boards, I think An Encounter might be pretty illustrative.

I actually didn't mind Ivy Day in The Committee Room. You pretty much need annotations for it unless you're familiar with the Irish politics of the time though.

There's also a sense of class posturing to it.

I'm a Brit with a decent knowledge of turn of the century politics, and Ivy Day in the Committee Room was one of my favourites. Very funny.

You guys serioisly need to stop looking for hidden meanings or life advices in everything you read. One of the things that make Joyce great is that he doesn't try to teach you.

>I'm only able to skim the crust, therefore there is no depth.

Gentle reminder that moralization doesn't have place in art It's like you didn't even read Stephen's ramblings on Aquinas at the end of Portrait. Also, an aesthetic work doesn't attempt to give opinions about the real world. Maybe if you can only read stuff like "After the race" as "some rich faggot goes on a boat with some other faggots and loses money" and need Joyce to give you a moral diagnosis about it, you're the one who's reading shallow.

Comfiest book ever
Also Araby is my favorite

I only remember three stories from it.

- one about some girl who is thinking about going on a boat to be with a guy.
- one about a dude who masturbates into a chalice or something.
- one about a limp penis symbolized by a boot.

so: Eveline, Araby, and The Dead.

I read an interpretation that suggested Jimmy represented Ireland's participation on the world stage.
All the people from other countries are unrelenting in their game and just keep taking his money till he writes an IOU that the other people calculate (and probably putting more than he actually owed) for him.

He keeps misreading the cards and suffers as a result. He was impressed by the host's taste and probably desired to be like him. Jimmy is doomed from the start and can't compete with the people he plays with but he still does it even knowing that he will regret it later.

It's not hard to how that story could be seen as a political statement although I don't know if agree that that's what it is.
Kind of interesting though.

What everyone's thoughts on An Encounter? I felt a weird feeling of missing my upbring in Ireland, except that I didn't grow up in Ireland.

I haven't ever really got that feeling from reading any other authors. Something about Joyce's writing always makes me feel like I'm just sitting around recalling memories. Not crazy life changing events either, just walks, breakfasts, small talk with friends or family; you just kind of sit there and wonder how you never appreciated just how amazing those events were. There's a kind of sadness knowing that you can't go back but also a kind of hopefulness in knowing that many future events like those are just ahead and you'll try, this time, to appreciate them.

He does somehow managed to draw on universal experiences in a unique way that meshes with the hyper locality of his writing. I think it's been said that his Dublin contains the entire world or something like that, and I agree.

>tfw i left all my james joyce at home when i went off to college

i really should read dubliners again

I wouldn't necessarily call it comfy. All the stories are pretty tragic and some are devastating

Two Gallants is the patrician choice. Nice work anons

It's definitely good, but the only reason to not say The Dead is your favorite is contrarianism.

counterparts is the GOAT short story

>people like Eveline

it's almost "Chick Lit"

I love the first three stories, they really set the tone for the rest of the book. Was An Encounter based on a real life experience?

...

almost certainly not

what the fuck is "chick lit"?

holy shit what an embarrassing post, what's the manly choice then you fat slut

I got the impression that the priest's own devotion to God was cracked just like the chalice, and this drove him mad.

It's a little 'spooky,' isn't it? If you're naturally superstitious you can almost read into the story the idea that God Himself drove the priest mad. A lot of the stories in Dubliners are like that. You could class at least a few of them as almost magical realism.

I felt worse for Maria leaving the cake on the train than I did for my own actual family members failing at something. Joyce is brilliant.

There's a 1:1 ratio of pedophiles to STD's.

>Araby
>The Dead

I don't read shitty books.

An Encounter is one of my favorite stories in the collection. Something about the old man's monologue is scary in a way I didn't expect.

>He began to speak on the subject of chastising boys. His mind, as if magnetised again by his speech, seemed to circle slowly round and round its new centre. He said that when boys were that kind they ought to be whipped and well whipped. When a boy was rough and unruly there was nothing would do him any good but a good sound whipping. A slap on the hand or a box on the ear was no good: what he wanted was to get a nice warm whipping. I was surprised at this sentiment and involuntarily glanced up at his face. As I did so I met the gaze of a pair of bottle-green eyes peering at me from under a twitching forehead. I turned my eyes away again.

Oh, and the last line of the story is utterly fantastic. When I first read it I felt like I had just read some sort of major plot twist but it's just a damn good sentence.

>And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little.

What's it like to have objectively shit taste user?

Funny you mention shit taste, the guy who shilled this book at me got toxoplasmosis from his cat's feces. His shit taste landed him a stay at hospital for a long weekend.

Only pseudointellectuals with cat shit taste find this book any good.

this is an excellent satire of the absurdity of anonymous posters on Veeky Forums making claims with percieved authority on objectivity based in limited worldview. really, a great post.

It actually happened. I don't take literary tips from cat doo doo eater man. You and him share shit taste.

Counterparts, you ignorant wretch

>Best
Araby
The Dead
Ivy Day in the Committee Room

>Worst
A Mother
The Boarding House
An Encounter

>Ivy Day
Dude it's got GOAT bants

Was Joyce at all political? That story and the argument in the beginning of Portrait seem to give the impression, but there always seems to be an air of detachment; it feels almost like Joyce is more interested in how being political affects people, while the actual political views are unimportant.

I'd be curious about what his real personal views were

The painful personal situations in Dubliners are almost too much to bear. Araby puts you there.

I always thought the guy taking the money from the girl was somehow connected with the servant-girl in "The Dead" talking about men "all palaver and what they can get out of you", or something like that.

...

He wrote about those things because everyone around him was up in arms over them when he was growing up. They're more a part of the place than a reflection of his own worldview.

>Only pseudointellectuals with cat shit taste find THIS book any good.
Fixed it for you!

araby
eveline
a little cloud

I have a fair bit of misogyny in me and Eveline tempers it. The way this story makes you feel the turmoil of the woman in a few simple pages is incredible.

I've always seen Dubliners as a collection of portraits of people. Similar to Notes from the Underground or a Hero of Our Time, the plots in Dubliners are secondary to the people in them.
You read through it and then you find one that hits you and it's like looking at your personality in a mirror.

Araby hits there, but for me A Painful Case hits a bit closer.

...

Toxoplasmosis literally hijacks your dopaminergic system and makes you more alpha.

Best toxin ever.

this guy fucks

G R A C E
R
A
C
E

Nobody here ever woke up drunk on a shit-slicked bathroom floor?? Plus the whole paranoid feeling of culty religious people?

Committee Room is great you fucking pleb. You are probably a nu male and that's why ypu didn't get it.

Grace is fucking hilarious desu

The Dead is clearly the best. Anyone who disagrees is an edgelord.

Two Gallants and A Painful Case are close runners up.

After the Race is fucking terrible.

He was when he was boy. He wrote a poem called Et Tu, Healy when he was 9.

All that remains is a fragment:

His quaint-perched aerie on the crags of Time
Where the rude din of this century
Can trouble him no more.

forgot to mention its about Parnell

Is this a good place to start with Joyce?

So why did Joyce name the first story "The Sisters"? They really don't seem integral to the plot and I'm not sure what if anything they're supposed to represent.

wrote a paper on this exact topic desu.

Switch the titles of the first story and the last. Seem more appropriate now?

that's a cute little gimmick and all but it fails to take into account
1. the sisters was written and titled far before the dead was even conceived
2. the dead was added on to dubliners after the collection was intended to be finished, with Grace as the last story

It's the perfect place to start.
But make sure you don't end with it. The first time I read Dubliners I felt like all the stories besides The Dead were a bit underwhelming.

After I read Portrait, I went back and reread Dubliners and loved it so much more. You need to let it sink in a bit to really appreciate it.

So you would recommend Portrait right after Dubliners? I really want to read more

The main character in Portrait returns in Ulysses, so reading it before that is a must. So unless you want to jump right into Riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, Portrait is the only choice.

Portrait is fantastic too. The only book I've read with better prose is Ulysses.