James Joyce
...ing. Mr.power,one of the friends who plot to take Mr.kernan to a religious retreat,says as much when he delivers the bruised and guilty sinner home to his wife: We¡¯ll make a new man of him, he said. Good night, Mrs.Kernan.¢Û Dubliners ,a collection of 15 short stories, is the first product of Joyce¡¯s lifelong preoccupation with Dublin life. The stories have artistic unity given to them by Joyce¡¯s intention to write a chapter of the moral history of his county,under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence,maturity,and public life. The whole unifying development is discernible as a sequence of events in a moral drama,an action of the human spirit struggling for survival under peculiar conditions of deprivation,enclosed and disabled by a degenerate environment that provides none of the primary necessities of spiritual life. ¡°Dubliners begins by presenting death as an inscrutable fact in a small boy¡¯s existence; it ends with a vision in which death is seen. It is seen as condition of the living as well as the dead,for life and death are interwoven and,in a sense, interchangeable. To make the Irish see death and living dead in their life is perhaps the first step,in Joyce¡¯s opinion,to evoke the national spirit of the Irish people. The description and evocation have a prescision and economy and sensitiveness which constitute the substance of the book¡¯s style just as the¡®scrupulous meanness¡¯constitutes its ironic surface. For the method is essentially ironic. The meanness of the languge has an air of accepting and taking for granted the meanness of what is described. The stories in Dubliners are also important as examples of Joyce¡¯s theoy of epiphany in fiction; each is concerned with a sudden revelation of truth about life inspired by a seemingly trivial incident.¡±¢Ü James Joyce,regarded as one of the most prominent stream-of-consciousness novelists,whose contribution to novel is great.he opened up a new area of life for novel by adding mental functioning and psychic existence to fiction and by creating a novel centered on the core of human experience. The satisfactory depiction of consiousness has required either the invention of new fictional techniques or a refocusing of the old ones. The basic techniques used in presenting streams of consciousness are: direct interior monologue,indirect interior monologue,omniscient description and soliloquy. The direct interior monologue presents consciousness directly to the reader without the author¡¯s interference,i.e. there is either a complete or near-complete disappearance of the author from the page,with his guiding ¡°he said¡±and ¡°he thought¡± and with his explanatory comments. There is no auditor assumed,i.e. the character is not speaking to anyone within the fictional scene; nor is the character speaking to the reader. The part of the last 45 pages in Joyce¡¯s Ulysses,for example,is ,perhaps,the most famous and the most extended and skillful direct interior monologue,which presents the consciousness of Molly Bloom while she is lying in bed. In this part,the elements of incoherence and fluidity are emphasized by the complete absence of punctuation,pronoun reference,and by the frequent interruption of one idea by another. James Joyce was good at stream-of-consciousness ,but he was even famous for he was free in his experiments with the English language and grammar. So...