This paper studies various connotations of space in James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914)(1) in relation to themes like freedom, love, alienation, and gender struggles. These are not just modernist issues common in Western literature but also critical to our understanding of Joyce’s challenge toward his own cultural and intellectual notions of country and identity. The positioning of oneself against the surrounding has been a popular topic in interdisciplinary studies as socio-cultural and technological advancements often lead to uncertainty, doubt and identity crisis in humanity. In literary representations, the self is problematized in the modern age: “so the unitary self, which had been the final hero of post-Renaissance literature, began to dissolve and disintegrate.…Modernism developed its rarified experimental discourse to map the fragmentary realities of selfhood” (2). Likewise, in Joyce’s novels and short stories, the characters are often seen struggling in the milieu. As aptly described by James Naremore, in Joyce’s fiction, “the private self could not be isolated from the larger, objective world” (3). The basic social unit in the form of home and Dublin as a native city and home in a broader sense are the spaces the characters have to contend with.  These spa ces are familiar and foreign, close and distant in Dubliners. The characters are in the home but not of the home. Spaces and selves in these short stories are constantly contesting one another.

The word space, though a common-sounding word, can be understood in geographical, conceptual, cultural and figurative terms. We are living somewhere, planning to be somewhere or looking for purposes somewhere. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines space broadly as “area, room, interval of space or time.” It can also mean “the distance from other people or things that a person needs in order to remain comfortable.” If “dead-air space” refers to “an unventilated air space,” on a figurative level, Joyce’s characters in their own ways try to escape from it. “Breathing space” is another variation of the use of space, which points to “some time in which to recover, get organized, or get going.” The Dubliners represented by Joyce in the short stories are seen lifeless and listless in need of good breathing space. Henri Lefebvre, in his well-known study of space, defines the term in different aspects: “the physical—nature, the Cosmos,” “the mental, including logical and formal abstractions” and “the social” (4). The word production is used recurrently in Lefebvre’s definitions of space because practices and processes can determine and define different spaces. Obvious references are locations and settings. There are other kinds like “representations of space, which are tied to the relations of production and to the ‘order’ which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes and to ‘frontal’ relations” (Lefebvre 33). Metaphorically, there are “representational spaces, embodying complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to art (which may come eventually to be defined less as a code of space than as a code of representational spaces” (5). The urban setting in Dubliners therefore foregrounds and aestheticizes the internal drama of the characters. There have been a number of publications on cities in Joyce’s work. (6) In this paper I would like to discuss how various representations of space impinge on the internal worlds of the characters who strive to reinvent and reconstruct their identities and purposes amidst the urban labyrinth.

Dublin is at the heart of Joyce’s writings, though artistically and literarily it is represented differently. Detailed studies of his novels can attest to this. In Dubliners, it is widely known that people, events, activities and places are presented in a realistic manner. “Commonality is the key to these stories. Common people, going about common tasks, on a common day,” writes Richard Lehan (7). Terence Brown explains that “Joyce intended Dubliners at the very least to be a realist’s study of his native city, a work representative of Irish experience” (8). Besides other literary and artistic discourses pertaining to the achievements of Dubliners, Joyce succeeds in presenting various predicaments of normal people in Dublin in the early twentieth century. As The Canterbury Tales enriches our understanding of the Age of Chaucer, so Joyce enlarges and even challenges readers’ perception of this Irish city in a panoramic manner. M.H. Abrams defines “local color” as follows: “The detailed representation in fiction of the setting, dialect, customs, dress, and ways of thinking and feeling which are characteristic of a particular region” (9).  Dubliners is an unadulterated example illustrating typical, daily and ordinary colours of Dublin. However, Joyce also succeeds in revealing literary and modernist problems and issues that are relevant to the understanding of universal human apprehension.

Reinhard Thum states that city is an extremely popular setting in literature for more than two centuries due to various changes in socio-cultural and industrial landscapes (10). Dublin is the setting in Dubliners and characters are seen striving to make sense of the environments, defining, reinventing themselves by various mental and physical escapes in the age-old city.

Taking the city as the backdrop, Joyce is challenging the Victorian sentimentality when his characters feel trapped in the house. Home is a basic unit in every society. In Dubliners, even something as ordinary as home is being debunked. In Victorian cultural and literary discourses, home is a nurturing, comforting and healing place. In Dubliners, the house is no longer the haven, which is a typical Victorian thought (11), but a prison that has to be endured. The characters in the short stories are not just battling against their homes and families but also Dublin which is the bigger dwelling in a larger scheme of things. Dublin doesn’t carry any positive connotation at all. It is a place of alienation, commonness, boredom and backwardness. Ireland had been artistically represented as beautiful countryside since the nineteenth century during which the worldview was founded on “a much more heroic and peopled romanticism, based on idealized notions of work, toil, Catholicism and the family” (12). Joyce demystifies all this by revealing the realistic, uninteresting and even mind-numbing aspects in everyday Dublin. “Work, toil, Catholicism and the family” are mundane, suffocating and entrapping. His characters are seen going through the daily grind without any possible change in the near future. Even hope and desires will become unrealized and shattered.

Escape is a very popular topic in the scholarship on Dubliners.  The way of escape and the space that is the outlet help to undermine the characters’ inner drama.  In “The Sisters,” the young narrator sees Rev. Flynn’s death as a release not just to the aging man but also more freedom for himself. He also dreams of going to a strange country: “I felt that I had been very far away, in some land where the customs were strange—in Persia” (6). Typical to the nineteenth-century imagination of Persia, an exotic escape is implied. One recurrent theme in the short stories is that leaving Dublin totally and going to a foreign place is the way to run away from dreariness. As the narrator in “An Encounter” puts it, “But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad” (12). His way of escape is to play Indian battles and read stories of the Wild West and American detective stories (11). In reality, escape is a key word in this story, which reinforces the urgent sense of longing of the character. Hana Wirth-Nesher notes that in “Dubliners, the turning points in most of the stories occur as a result of interaction with strangers” (13). Then the boy meets a stranger who is a sailor: “he seemed to be fairly old for his moustache was ashen-grey” (16). The young narrator finds that there is “the gaze of a pair of bottle-green eyes peering at me [him]” (19).

When the sailor takes the initiative to talk to him and tells him about his interest in books of adventures, romances and his experiences, it is as if “he were unfolding some elaborate mystery” (20). The young protagonist further comments, “his voice, as he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him” (20). This story is an ironic twist of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) by Samuel Coleridge (1771-1834). The young boy, like the Wedding Guest, is being stopped by an old sailor and then mesmerized by his story. Horror, mystery, violence and loss of innocence of the Ancient Mariner are illustrated in the old sailor’s tales in Joyce’s ironic rewriting of Coleridge’s poem.  According to Lefebvre, there are “representational spaces” that can be “linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life” (14). As such, the space in “An Encounter” is characterized as a sailor that is unfamiliar, mystifying, distant and also marginalized in the sense that he is not of a respectable class. Though the young boy fancies adventures, he realizes that the sailor is too foreign in terms of outlook and background and decides to take off. When faced with a choice between home and the sailor who offers temporary escape, he chooses home that is now more comfortable and secure. As it is, a boring place is better than a dangerous place. Referring to the constant mention of various classes in Dubliners, especially the poorer social stratum, Brown writes that “class consciousness is a recurrent motif” (xxi). Rejecting the old sailor therefore signals the innate fear toward the other which has an alien and low bearing.

The young character in “Araby,” like the one in “An Encounter,” longs for an exotic escape. However, the space of escape to him is the bazzar. Even the mention of “Araby” can “cast an Eastern enchantment” (14). Though he looks forward to going there, due to the delay of his uncle, he arrives there too late to do so. That the character is treated coldly by the young lady makes him reluctant to choose any gift. The wrong time and the wrong people contribute to paralysis in another form when the protagonist leaves in “anguish and anger” (28).

There is this motif in several of Joyce’s stories: At the moment of knowledge or fulfillment, there is a sudden turn of event or action. This helps to sharpen the agony and shock of paralysis.

“Eveline,” like “An Encounter” and “Araby,” illustrates this pattern and in fact carries certain dominant themes and issues in Dubliners.  Here is a woman who has worked extremely hard and suffered abuse at home and is now longing for escape. She hopes to “explore another life with Frank” (31) who is a sailor representing a world of romance, mystery, excitement and exoticism which Eveline desires badly. The space of escape is characterized in Frank, like the old sailor. Unlike the young boy, Eveline has a real chance of escaping to the far-off place that she has heard so much about. Home and Dublin mean familiarity and security to her as she thinks, “In her home anyway she had shelter and food; she had those whom she had known all her life about her” (30). Frank promises newness in every respect when Eveline cries in her heart: “Escape…Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too” (33). To have a better life means going with Frank to another country, thus leaving Dublin totally. Given the toil, abuse and harshness she has experienced, it is understandable that Eveline has great emotional needs that she feels can only be met in her new phase of life with Frank. At the crucial moment, she remembers the past, that is, “her promise to keep the home together as long as she could” after the death of her mother (33).

Staying behind means fulfilling her promise, duty and remaining complacent as before while going off with Frank means satisfying her personal dreams and desires. These are contested spaces: one is home, the familiar and the other is an unknown country. Going abroad is an ultimate way of escape, as shown in other stories in Dubliners. On one hand, Eveline is desperate for a complete change in her life; on the other hand, her final decision, though look sudden and dramatic, in fact reveals the consequences of her living under the deep bondage of the past, traditions and abuse for many years. In a psychological rendering, Eveline is struggling between the superego that reminds her of her promises and duty, and the id which is represented by Frank. She is the ego negotiating between these two impulses. While the superego indicates the conventional idea of a woman being safe in the family, the id promises adventures, newness, and passion with a fascinating man in an exotic country. Eveline is the ego where the battlefield is. The id, however, also implies insecurity, instability and uncertainty. Her dilemma can again be explained in psychological terms: “the criticism on the part of the super-ego is ultimately, therefore, a defensive mechanism designed to prevent the generation of anxiety in the ego, or—put in more ideational language—to protect the self from the supposed dangers arising from id impulses” (Ernest Jones 269). Therefore, her decision not to go with Frank indicates the victory of the superego. Eveline’s inner voice prompts her to stay with all that is familiar to her, though she despises the normal life.

On a spiritual level, Daniel K. Olukoya states that it is the working of a destructive emptier which has its origin in the Bible: “For the Lord has turned away the excellency of Jacob as the excellency of Israel, but the emptiers have emptied them out and marred their vine branches”. He expounds:

Sometimes emptiers are referred to as destroyers…. The emptiers empty good things from peoples’ lives. They would not kill the person. Their intention is only to empty. Sometimes, the emptiers would wait for the cup to be filled before they turn it over…. Victims of the emptiers find it difficult to prosper…. It is the work of the emptiers who do not want them to concentrate on profitable things…. Progress will stop. (“Power of the Emptier”)(15)

In light of this explanation, Eveline’s choice of staying behind can be traced back to the cumulative and gradual effects of her perception of the past and her self. The intensity of past hurt, violence and maltreatment has emptied all of Eveline’s mental and emotional energy and made it difficult for her to have any real breakthroughs. Instead of launching into a new life and self, she withdraws to her former self and her house. She is not dead at the end of the story but will dwell in emotional poverty. In readers’ minds, Eveline can be seen for the rest of her life repeating her daily chores and living miserably in her familiar surrounding, be it home or Dublin. Of course, no hope or joy is promised. The concluding moment has Eveline looking “passive, like a helpless animal” (34). Olukoya’s idea of the emptier explicates the frozen and paralytic state of Eveline and other Dubliners. The triumph of the superego brings no better understanding or advancement but ironically debases Eveline to the point that she loses her humanity. In a gender interpretation, Eveline chooses to fulfill her traditional role as a woman in a place that is fit for her, home. The sense of duty and the security of all that is familiar are reinforced to her on the part of conventions. After all, in a traditional view, women are not supposed to go off like this or they will be in great danger. These values are often considered as a patriarchal way of upholding the different roles between men and women.  Tori Moi comments on such gendered duality:

Corresponding as they do to the underlying opposition Man/Woman, these binary oppositions are heavily imbricated in the patriarchal value system: each opposition can be analysed as a hierarchy where the ‘feminine’ side is always seen as the negative, powerless instance. (16)

Indeed, Eveline’s perception of her duty comes from a deeper cultural bondage that is too much for one woman to handle, let alone break. As aforementioned, in “An Encounter,” the young boys try to avoid the older man, which is another version of the war between the superego and the id. But it is presented in a less heartbreaking and disappointing manner. Children are often taught not to relate to strangers. The young boys, though long for adventures, games and excitement, feel that they have to flee from the older man who seems to offer them another world that is mysterious and unknown. While Catherine Whitley writes that “for women and young boys in Dubliners, the commercial city can be uncomfortable, threatening space to be in,” I would add that the outside or another world represented by the old sailor is no less safe than the city (17). Whitley states, “Initially men are associated with the external spaces of the city while women are implicated with the internal, domestic spaces of the home” (18). When thinking of escaping with Frank, the question “what would they say of her” often haunts Eveline (30). The question is loaded with historical, social and cultural undercurrents. Therefore, Eveline’s problem is not just personal but one that is fuelled with a profound feminist challenge. Sailors are men who are free to explore but not women. In those days, even associating with sailors was not virtuous for a woman, let alone eloping. Readers are left with the feeling that there is no second chance for Eveline. To borrow Joyce’s words in “A Little Cloud,” she will remain “a prisoner for life” (80). Being sailors, Frank and the older man represent wandering figures that also imply rootlessness and alienation. Even if they represent escape, they are illusive spaces. That they are rejected at the end points to a paradoxical resistance on the part of the author where freedom and class disparity are concerned. Retreating to the familiar surrounding may look like a lesser evil but by choosing the path of least resistance the characters will forever remain disillusioned.

In Joyce, women have their struggles in the areas of love, marriage and family. However, men, regardless of age, are equally powerless. Though the exoticism represented by the two sailors seems to illustrate the force of id and the space of escape, there is another sophisticated attraction, London, that is inaccessible too. Little Chandler in “A Little Cloud,” like other characters, feels that one gets nowhere in Dublin. He thinks, “if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin” (68). His friend Gallaher encourages him, “If you want to enjoy yourself properly you must go to Paris” (72). Though Gallaher is seen as “inferior in birth and education,” he has managed to refine and reinvent himself in another country. When Little Chandler returns home, he realizes that he is still trapped by the dreary side of life. Joyce comments, “he was a prisoner for life” (80). Be it Buenos Aries or London or Paris, the space of escape is foreign. Paris is usually considered as an ideal and stylish place of freedom and romance and therefore seems to be a more classy choice. Home in Dublin suffers by comparison and does not provide a heaven on earth to Little Chandler but a prison house. Dublin being a deadening place, Joyce at the same time resists the popular Victorian notion of a home as a shelter from the busy and uncomfortable life out there. He also deflates the idea of home being a haven for both men and women and exposes the suffocating and languid nature of home and family. Home is a place of confinement, a trap. In a similar vein, Farrington in “Counterparts” finds home a place not for recuperation but a place for him to vent out his bitterness.

While women find no happiness at home, Joyce’s male characters are living under the curse in the fallen world. Mr Duffy, Farrington, Little Chandler exemplify those who have to toil for a living and endure the shallow quality of life. Gabriel in “The Dead” suffers from the unromantic and unimaginative nature of life in Dublin. “The Boarding House” is itself a microcosm of the contesting space faced by the characters. Indeed, social criticism contributes to paralysis in Dubliners as Doran puts it, “Dublin is such a small city: everyone knows everyone else’s business” (61). This is also a factor that makes Eveline unwilling to go with Frank. The Boarding house symbolizes the space that has steeped in human and social traditions. Such space is an epitome of what Lefebvre defines as an entity that comprises the physical, the mental and the social domains (19). Doran’s decision to get married shows his submission to what people and society expect of him.  Shari Benstock states that women in Dubliners “do not exist outside the city limits, but rather are entrapped by pockets within those city limits: the spaces they inhabit are enclosed, sequestered, confined” (20). This statement can also be extended to the men characters who find no true escape but remain alone like Mr Duffy or return home frustrated like Little Chandler.

Joyce reverses the image of the angel and the divine concept of home in Coventry Patmore’s “The Angel in the House” (1854) by having some of his women characters, as well as men, turn out to be ordinary, mundane beings. Home is no longer the place for moral growth, comfort and maintenance. It becomes a downward training ground that turns propriety into inelegance. Mrs Kearney in “A Mother,” and Mrs Kernan in “Grace,” before they got married took the stable, bourgeiois home and status as a factor for choosing a husband. Ironically, in both stories, the well-off home and husband turns out to be less than desirable and romantic. Home is more like a purgatory to both men and women. The two women’s desires are shattered. Mrs Kernan is a woman who goes through the motion of things without any hope and ends up having to put up with everything. It is even more paradoxical that the domestic confinement has made Mrs Kearney turn out to be a woman who yells in the public for trying to get better terms of the contract for her daughter. Probably, Mrs Kearney could have never foreseen herself to be like this when still single. “In Dubliners the appearance of women in the ‘masculine’ domain of public spaces usually signals that there is something wrong with the situation,” writes Whitley (21). At the end of the story, she is depicted as a loud and unreasonable woman, which is a derogatory image often associated with older housewives. It can be that she is venting out her anger out of her disappointment with marriage and life. She may mean well by speaking up for her daughter yet other characters show no sympathy. Joyce satirizes the woman as a nuisance in the contesting spaces of both the private sphere and the public sphere.

The image of a woman being imprisoned and dehumanized in a house is made more extreme by pitting her against the window. Randolph Splitter states that in Dubliners and especially “in ‘The Dead’ the image of a man or woman separated from someone or something by a door or window appears (in all these variations) many times” (22). I would propose another way of understanding this posture. A woman leaning against the window is an icon made enormously popular in Petrarchan sonnets when the woman is seen high up on the tower and the man is looking at her or singing to her from below. Dante Rossetti (1828-1882), borrowing this image, aestheticizes this image to a new height in his “The Blessed Damozel” (1850).  The beginning verses read, “The blessed Damozel leaned out / From the gold bar of heaven” (23). The Damozel is forever leaning on the heavenly bar desiring and yearning for his lover. Joyce makes use of this motif to confine his characters to their respective places. The narrator at the beginning of the story, “The Sisters,” tries to find out how things are in the house by looking into the window: “[I] studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly” (1). He finds the sisters in the house ordinary and gossipy. Their lives are, figuratively, as small and tight-fitting as the coffin. Eveline is another case in point. Readers are told, again at the beginning: “She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains” (29). Here is a frustrated and bored woman who longs for a new life by casting her hope on Frank. Her decision not to elope with Frank at the end of the story will lead her back to where and how the entire story begins—she will be watching in vain in her house.

I agree with James Naremore that in Joyce’s writings, “the private self could not be isolated from the larger, objective world” (24). Though the characters try to escape and realize their dreams and true selves, they live under social expectations and conventions that are burdensome, repetitive and restrictive. Gabriel looks at his wife who is at the top of the staircase: “She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something” (211). That he is at the bottom of the steps imagining what his wife is thinking reminds readers of the image of the lover looking up at the heavens and fantasizing what the heavenly Damozel is doing in “The Blessed Damozel.” Likewise, Gabriel starts to fantasize and romanticize about his wife.  Life has become mundane and now he has to chance to reinvent his marriage when there is the staircase between husband and wife. And there is also a heavenly staircase between Rossetti’s lovers. The space is at once real and imaginary as Gabriel reads into the mystery in front of him.  Such space seems to offer him creativity, beauty and newness, which he needs badly.  Here is another form of escape when his imagination takes flight, hoping to renew his spirit and love.  When Gretta later tells Gabriel about her former lover who died longing for her, it is reminiscent of the theme of love and death in Rossetti’s poem.  Though it is a story of romance, Gabriel has no part in it.  His sense of fantasy is ignited just to be dashed down harder to reality. This scene can be interpreted as a skeptical twist to Jacob’s ladder in Genesis 28:12, “And he [Jacob] dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it” (KJV). Instead of encountering God and receiving life-changing revelation like Jacob in this dream, Gabriel’s pain is aggravated and the emotional gulf between him and his wife is enlarged by the staircase.

Ideas of death and paralysis have been noted and studied by many critics concerning Joyce’s short stories.(25) Lefebvre explains, “Death too has a ‘location’, but that location lies below or above appropriated social space; death is relegated to the infinite realm so as to disenthrall (or purify) the finiteness in which social practice occurs” (26). Throughout the short stories, many characters are seen making sense of death and positioning themselves when it occurs.  Indeed, death, be it physical or mental or spiritual, lingers over the Dubliners. In “The Sisters,” when the young boy says, “I said softly to myself the word paralysis,” he is making a statement that anticipates one dominant theme in the collection, the theme of paralysis (1). Rev. James Flynn dies of it. Religion, old age, death and paralysis are captured in the recurrent image of him lying in his coffin, which lingers over the narrator’s mind. Narrow-mindedness is also implied. Death is the only way to escape an unfulfilled life and unrequited love. Mrs Emily Sinico’s death in “A Painful Case” illustrates the unbearable pain of a discontented soul.  Moreover, it indicates the emptier at work destroying her. Mr. Duffy’s deep-seated agony and loneliness is revealed and heightened but there is no solution. Joyce writes, “he was outcast from life’s feast. He turned his eyes to the grey gleaming river, winding along towards Dublin” (113).  The overwhelming darkness of space and self merges in this mocking moment. Dublin remains too huge and dark to be transcended and the man remains hopeless and helpless. At the end of the story, readers are told simply that “he felt that he was alone” (114). Such succinct statement reflects the futility and temperament of most characters in the short stories.

Readers are reminded of death in one way or another. The first and the last stories deal with deaths.  The first story, “The Sisters,” centres on the errands after the death of Rev. Flynn. Life is still as boring as before, Joyce seems to say. The sense of death lingers over the atmosphere when the poem, “The Death of Parnell,” is read in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.”  Besides physical death, the characters who are still alive are living deaths being confined to their environments or routines. Dublin is like a graveyard burying alive its citizens in Joyce’s stories. The influence of the deceased mother is present not just in the house but also in Eveline’s mindset. By extension, the stubborn clinging to the past or to the traditions is an ironic twist to the theme of death, which can be understood in a symbolic manner. The last story in the collection combines physical with spiritual deaths altogether. Desmond Harding even comments that “The Dead” can be understood “as a text subsumed in elegy, and in particular William Wordsworth’s notion of the epitaphic mode” (27). The last story is inconclusive as the protagonist aestheticizes the past and the present, the living and the dead. Gabriel, as well as other Dubliners, is seen mediating between the two without any solid ground to stand on.

In the first half of the story Gabriel is seen as a man who has lost any interest and romance in life and marriage but manages to keep up the appearance and manner of a proper bourgeois professional, which is in fact another manifestation of paralysis in his outlook of life. His statement “I’m sick of my own country, sick of it” helps sum up the theme and feeling toward Dublin in the entire collection (190). This echoes the theme of paralysis in his life, as well as other characters’ in other stories. In the second half of the story, death also prevails when his wife tells of her past with a young man who died for her. After listening to her, he poeticizes death and reality:

He imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree….His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead….His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. (224-225)

In Gabriel’s mind, he blurs out the fine line between life, death, reality and dreamland. Paradoxically, he finds all this more poignant and emotive than the daily grind and the social exchanges in the first half of the story. The story of Gretta’s past lover moves him to a more philosophical discourse as he muses over the delicate differences between the world and the underworld. What starts out as an ordinary story of an ordinary couple turns to be a truth-seeking yet dreamy encounter of a desperate soul. As Naremore comments, “the more Gabriel tries to drift away, the more his thoughts serve as a commentary on his present circumstances, showing how his character has been molded by his family and his social life” (28). Gabriel negotiates between superficial social exchanges and deeper soul searching but fails to attain any concrete changes from the inside out.

At the end of the story, Joyce writes, “His [Gabriel’s] 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” (225). Referring back to Lefebvre’s idea of death of being to “disenthrall (or purify) the finiteness in which social practice occurs” (29), readers note that the young lover’s death is more transcendental and enduring than Gabriel’s lack-luster life. The realm of death, as represented by Michael Furey, seems more real and passionate, than the respectable-looking reality represented by Gabriel. The ending of “The Dead” has Gabriel gaze upon the falling snow. For this image, Joyce borrows from Mt 5: 44-45 which reads “That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (KJV). In this passage, believers, that is, God’s children, are exhorted to love the enemies so as to be Christ like. Their identity bespeaks of divine duty and responsibility. As Gabriel is looking at the snow, so he reflects upon how he has perceived himself. Has he fully lived out his destiny? Has he believed, enjoyed and motivated by his identity as an Irish, as a citizen in Dublin or simply as a human being? These are recurrent questions in Dubliners in which characters find many ways to escape but fail to be in touch with their true selves. In other words, the characters are so frustrated with their identities, be it public in professional community or private in a domestic environment, that they find it hard to live a purposeful life. Joyce’s use of the Biblical verses implies the insufficient Irish identity as an inspirational force for fulfilled living.

The characters in Dubliners are looking for spaces to escape physically and hope for a new phase of life. They are not looking at purely emotional freedom right where they are. Joyce is saying that Dublin offers no opportunities to do that. However, different representations of spaces contest against the selves who are struggling between options or opportunities.  To go back to the concept of the emptier at work: characters hope to renew their lives and freshen their identities outside the surroundings but at the crucial moment, events and feelings gain the upper hand and further annihilate their efforts and dreams. The pessimistic overtone rings throughout the entire collection. The first story begins with a young narrator looking up at the window and the last story finishes with an older man who is looking up at the snow. Though the plot, the context and the age are different, things have come full circle. Such circularity implies the fated nature of trying to contest against both spaces and selves. Though they try to find an outlet, they are bound by other constraints. Their situation has been foretold in Matthew 13: 14, “And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive” (KJV). This scripture refers to those who are too spiritually numb to understand the real nature of faith and the Gospel. In a similar vein, the Dubliners, as shown by Joyce, are innately deadened by the surrounding, the city, social conventions and people’s criticism; so much so that they fail to realize that revolution, freedom and change should start from the inside. The battle is indeed within and makes the escape difficult because of the constant withdrawal in the heart. Dublin in these stories casts an unsympathetic effect on its citizens.  The negativity associated with the city can be traced back to the post-lapsian nature concerning mankind and land. Characters like Mr. Duffy and Farrington, suffer under the Adamic curse as stated in Genesis 3:17—“cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life” (KJV). The characters are depicted living in a post-Edenic age that is constraining in every respect. Human beings are reduced to human doings.  Phil Macnaghten and John Urry elaborate on man’s striving in the modern period: “Modernity involved the belief that human progress should be measured and evaluated in terms of the domination of nature, rather than through any attempt to transform the relationship between humans and nature” (30). Joyce, however, illustrates the regress, backwardness and stagnancy encountered by his characters in Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed it is the spirit of the tail that baffles people and events. The first Adam caused the Fall of man but there is the second Adam who has offered living hope and redemption. Joyce offers no second Adam in Dubliners but remains skeptical and gloomy, thereby condemning life in the Irish context and revealing the predicaments of the disjointed self against the backdrop of the modern age.