What's your favourite story in Dubliners that's not called The Dead? Tell my why

What's your favourite story in Dubliners that's not called The Dead? Tell my why.

Are there any that you particularly dislike?

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Araby and A Painful Case for me

Didn't care much for Eveline desu

I have Dubliners sitting on my desk, but dont want to read it. I know its going to bring back memories of me living in Dublin followed by a feeling of guilt and regret for leaving. I miss that city so much. Theres nothing spectacular about it, yet there is. The people, the history, the energy. Just things I don't get up here in Northern Canada.

Holy shit Joyce is in the thread.

Chase that feel. In A Little Cloud there's a character who has come back to visit Diblin after many years living away.

tfw didn't like the dubliners, what's the appeal? It's just a bunch of stories, nothing extraordinary. I didn't miss anything r-right?

Well The Dead is far and away the best, but if I had to choose another, there's just something I really like about Ivy Day in the Committee Room.

Where in the north?

and Abary for me is my favourite, I like the whole bazaar setting.

A Little Cloud, hands down. Really loved An Encounter too.
But A Little Cloud fills you with regrets like no other story

Honestly Dublin is as bad as european capitals get. Tbf Irish people are great and kinda make up for the otherwise wholly unremarkable city.

Northern British Columbia.
I totally agree. There is nothing remarkable about Dublin. In every other large European city ive been to, I can point out what I enjoyed. But Dublin is a junkie infested, dirty, expensive city reeking of piss and vomit from tourists' stag parties. Yet I love it at the same time. I didn't have a single Irish friend in Dublin. My friends were other recent immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe. We were as poor as it could get without being homeless. We worked close to 60 hours a week, multiple jobs. It was the best time in my life so far. Being 19 and living abroad, on my own for the first time. I think thats why I love Dublin so much.

I liked Araby a lot. In fact I loved the first three. I wish he had written more in first person. Interesting that he only ever used it for young male protagonists.

An Encounter was my favourite I think. The closing lines have stuck with me.

>How my heart beat as he came running across the field to me! He ran as if to bring me aid. And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little.

The one I liked the least was Counterparts, just because the ending lacked the subtlety that the other stories had made me accustomed to.

Dubliners is maybe nothing extraordinary if you only do a surface reading, but even then you have Joyce's prose going for it.

I think I only fully grasped what Joyce was trying to do when I finished A Painful Case (which is pretty late in the book tbf) and only because Joyce hammers his point pretty hard on this one. When the protagonist puts down the newspaper and he overlooks Dublin from the hill you can FEEL his loneliness, you understand perfectly what is going through his mind even though the story is seemingly comprised of quotidian encounters, minutiae.
The very last paragraphs of each story are (I think) supposed to provoke the same effect on you. He used epiphanies to achieve the same goal as the stream-of-consciousness he used in his latter work.

The whole book is also full of symbolism but I'm not Catholic or Irish or even a native English speaker so I'll leave that one to scholars. It's nonetheless an amazing book and you should definetly reread it more closely this time.

I think I know exactly what you mean, I had a similar experience my first time moving abroad to Scotland as a 20 year old. For me, the feeling of being an absolute stranger to everyone and not be expected to play a certain "role" that the people that have known you for ages subconsciously expect you to was extremely liberating. I had never met as many people and lead my life the way I actually wanted as those two precious years, and it's something I've never been able to replicate afterwards.

Did you ever go on to live abroad? Did you even have plans to? I've got a creeping fear of never fulfilling my passion for travel. I came back to Canada to study, but now i fear that I'll be stuck working some shitty job to pay off my student debt, and never really get around to continuing my travels.

Yes, I moved to Hamburg after learning German for two years. Came back to my home country (different city tho) for a cushy job. I had no debt so I could afford to dick around for a year earning peanuts while learning the language, which is maybe not possible in your situation. Hopefully you can get a decent paying job when you graduate and pay off your student debt.

I'm halfway through right now and After the Race was probably my favourite so far. Max comfy. Makes my diners/nights out with friends seem so mediocre.

>The whole book is also full of symbolism but I'm not Catholic or Irish or even a native English speaker so I'll leave that one to scholars
I can recommend reading an edition with endnotes for reference. This one's pretty solid: book-info.com/isbn/0-14-018554-2.htm

"Well, said Ignatius Gallahar, it's a relaxation to come over here, you know. And, after all, it's the old country, as they say, isn't is? You can't help having a certain feeling for it."
This user () was right. Skip ahead to A Little Cloud. Give it a shot.

Anyway, Dublinfag, please help a brother out with some advice.
I'm considering going to dear dirty Dublin for a semester with the erasmus exchange program, but Trinity isn't available...
Is University College Dublin or Maynooth any good (specifically for philosophy & history)?

Do the full year if you can afford it, you'll be bawling your eyes out when you have to leave in such a short time

Don't only go for one year. Ucd is a very well respected school. The campus is nice and in the posh area of Dublin, but also a 20 minute luas ride from the city centre.

You can only go for one semester at my department thought. I wouldn't even want to go longer desu, because my department for philo already is toptier, so from an academic standpoint it's not the best move anyway.
But:
>tfw you get the change to read Ulysses in Dublin

Thanks. That sounds pretty nice, twenty minutes isn't too bad. Are the philo and history departments well respected as well? It's always hard to judge such things for a complete outsider.

Araby!

Not gonna lie, I was assigned to read it in school at the exact same time that I developed this huge /r9k/-tier crush on a girl.

Still hits me in the nostalgia feels.

Clay brought me to tears when Maria forgot the plumcake. What a sweet old woman... she just wants what's best for others

:^(

Not the guy you're replying to but nobody will care how well respected the department you did a 6 month erasmus in is. You will learn a new methodology of studies and hopefully get a decent professor or two because you are new there so you don't have any way to tell and pick the shitty ones from the good. If you have never lived abroad, the stuff you learn outside uni will be more important than the academic part too.

No love for counterparts? I can't help tear up every time I read it.

I know this is going to sound cliched, but a painful case literally had me holding back tears.

I felt so lonely reading it.

I liked The Sisters. There was something a little spooky about it. The priests wake. The old guy advising his mum not to let the kid hang around the priests.
And the old priest sitting alone in the confessional laughing to himself.

Yeah I like that one. It's impossible to read it without thinking of all the abuse in the Catholic Church that has since come to light. Really amplifies the sense of unease surrounding the boy's ambiguous relationship with the priest.

The stories didn't do anything for me until I reached Eveline. Then suddenly at the end her loneliness and her inner tornup-ness all hit me in one go. Same thing with A Painful Case.

I see Araby mentioned a lot in this thread, but that one I found a little harder to appreciate. Certainly the boy's feelings were well depicted, but it seemed obvious to me that he was making a mistake staking so much emotion on a girl who had never explicitly reciprocated any of his feelings. It was difficult to read in the same way it's difficult watching a skyscraper fall in slow motion.

Eveline has the best ending lines of pretty much any story I've read. It does a lot, man.

strawpoll.me/12080327

My favorite two would be between Little cloud and Eveline. Leaning more towards Eveline. Why didn't you like it? Just curious.
The story hit me immediately when I read it too. I still read it over and over because her self sacrificing nature is just tragic. My name is Frank and my first love was and still lives under similar circumstances as Eveline. It made it all the more real. Just really beautifully sad. I can never get the image of Frank standing on the ferry staring back at Eveline on the dock, seeing her loving expression fade. Hits me hard.

Dubliners is obsessed with escape from the city to abroad. Eveline, A Little Cloud, The Dead etc.. You'd absolutely love it.

that shit was fucking boring and I'm halfway through ulyssess and that's boring as fuck too.

As for me, A Painful Case, definitely. What I fear I will end up as.

It's ok user, you're just a pleb

The end of A Little Cloud hit me fairly hard because I have a newborn to take care of and I could really empathise with his frustration at his inconsolable child, as well as his early delusions of grandeur, then his latter feelings of jealousy and failure. I like to think that things improved for him and that he adjusted to fatherhood in the end.

I think that perhaps it's equally obsessed with escape from the quotidian. Of course the small city life plays a large role in the sorrowful lives of the characters, but I felt there was a desire to escape one's reality overall. Also may be a reflection of our inability to change our own situations when faced with the fear of change and gradual acceptance/desire for a safe known vs the unknown.

>tfw my grad application to Trinity hasnt been rejected yet

Classic Pól MacDaino

Classic "Classic Paul Dano" Poster

Paralysis is a big theme in Dubliners. If I remember correctly, the first story starts with a paralyzed priest on his deathbed

A Painful Case and Eveline.

Yes, that was one of the stories I didn't really enjoy but it was death/paralysis. I rather like the whole paralysis and or impotence aspect of the stories. Maybe it's one of those universal human concepts Joyce tapped into. Maybe we're all Dubliners.

>Maybe we're all Dubliners after all.

Joyce you fucking hack

you got me...