The Modernistic Features in Joyce’s Dubliners

Abstract

James Joyce’s Dubliners is highly modernistic in terms of both content and form. This paper attempts to make an exploration of its modernistic themes of paralysis, loneliness, and death felt by Dubliners at the turn of a century due to religious and political plights, and to analyze Joyce’s modernistic writing techniques of epiphany, symbolism, dilution of plots, and shift of narrative perspectives, through which the characters’ spiritual subtleties and social complexities are revealed. It aims to show that these modernistic writing techniques highlight the characters’ confusion, depression, and resignation in modern Dublin, and Joyce thus presents a chaotic social panorama of Ireland.