Blog Post Week 4 Jebediah Pritchard
The story that was the most interesting to me this week was The Dead.
Not the whole story though. Most of the story was not to grand.
Though the last pages of The Dead were something very good.
These pages were pages written in the style of Poe and other such dark romantic authors.
James Joyce did not express dark romanticism until the final few pages of The Dead, in Dubliners. Gabriel loved his wife and wanted to be with her. Upon the moment, she tells him of her true love, her lost love. The love that had died early on, the love that had died for her.
To Gabriel this is crushing. Had she ever really loved him , as he had loved her. Or was he lesser a man than the man that departed breath for her. " His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead." This imaginary is haunting and grand.
Response to Ashley B Blog
Is there a theme in each story? Are these stories dark? There is a theme in every story and I believe that there is an overgrandizing of Joyce's themes and end story thoughts by the main character of each story are not epiphanies. The Dead is the only story that is dark to me and only the last few pages.
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We have finally finished the book The Dubliners. After reading it, I have to say that I enjoyed the story “The dead” the most. I felt that it was so much more detailed and easier to understand than any of the other stories that we read. I think one of the reasons that I enjoyed it so much was because it was longer, and I could understand the characters more, than just in a few pages. I have a theory about something. I agree that Gabriel doesn’t have the ability to love Gretta like her late husband, however, is there a deeper meaning to this? Maybe he can never love her as much as he late husband because she can’t let him in? I don’t know if this is relevant but it’s just a theory. I also thought that they seemed to enjoy the party, and they looked forward to tradition, and maybe that’s why they like it so much. Like in class, we talked about certain traditions that might be annoying to do, but enjoy them because they are traditions. After reading this book, I understand more of Dublin’s history and see how they were so “Stuck”. It was a different time then, and they had different values. This story is the only story I see in this book, where I see change happening. I see Gabriel changing and doing something about his marriage.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Jebediah’s post:
I agree with Jebediah’s post. The whole story wasn’t all that great, but I do think that it was necessary to get in touch with the characters and to see where they were coming from. Do you agree with this? I also agree that Gabriel was crushed after learning that she thought that he could never love her as much as her previous husband had.
Alex Rhodes.
Having finished “The Dubliners,” I am happy to be moving on to Angela’s Ashes. Joyce is an exceptional writer, but the stories were getting harder and harder to read because of the hidden meanings and the symbolism, especially of Ireland, that we may not understand. We are a different generation than that of Joyce’s, and we don’t have the same experiences as he does in Ireland. “The Dead,” is the only hopeful thing in the whole collection. Gabriel has realized that the love for his wife was never as great as the love Michael Furey had for her. And upon this realization, he had realized that he needed to change his life, for he had never had that kind of feeling for another. He was going to move forward, “the time had come for him to set out on his westward journey.” Compared to “Grace,” we see the optimism in “The Dead” is much greater. In “Grace,” the character of Mr. Kernan has no intentions of being a better Catholic. It is only the wish of his wife, and as he attends the mass with friends, we see that he is a lost cause. It will be a great task to get him back into the Church, and it seems very hopeless.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Jebediah’s Post.
I agree that there is dark romanticism in the last few pages of “The Dead.” It is very crushing to Gabriel that the other man had loved her so much more than him that he had died for her. How was Gabriel supposed to compete with that? There is nothing greater than giving your life for someone.
Leah Scabilloni
We finally finished ‘Dubliners’ by reading the last story, ‘The Dead.’ In this story, I really felt for Gabriel. He goes to this party, nervous about the speech that he is going to make and actually pulls the speech off. At the end of the party, he sees his wife in the most beautiful of ways. He finds himself really fortunate that he has Gretta in his life. However, the reason that she is so beautiful here because she is thinking about her long lost love. How much of a blow to the heart is that for Gabriel? His wife is beautiful when thinking about another man. And it’s not like Gabriel can really do anything about it because Furey is dead. How can you move on from that realization? Whenever Gretta is looking particularly pretty, how can he not second guess himself about whether or not she is thinking about Furey? I have to agree with what Professor Howard said about the last passage of the story. It really is nicely written. ‘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.’ This is one of the best lines in the end. Gabriel has this dark realization that everything will die. Death is inevitable; ‘One by one, they are all becoming shades.’ We talked about in class that of all people in ‘The Dubliners’ Gabriel probably has the best chance of improving his life. I however do not think this is true, all because this is a James Joyce book. We hadn’t seen other hints of improvement. Why should Death be any different?
ReplyDeleteI agree with what Alex Rhodes and what is said in the post. ‘The Dead’ did seem s=easier to read. Was this because it was longer and we were able to really understand the characters? Probably. I also thought that the people who attended the party were actually happy to be there. We said in class that they did not want to be there. But traditions can be happy. The familiarity of traditions is something that people need, especially in Ireland at that time.
In responce to Alex Rhodes' post:
ReplyDeleteI really agree with you Alex in the begining of your post when you said you enjoyed the story the "Dead" more because it was longer. Like you, by having a longer story I can understand the characters more and relate to where they are coming from in a better way. I feel that by having so many short stories you never really get into the story because by the time you do, its over. I loved the detail Joyce was able to use because the story was that much longer.
Posted by: Kris Braxton
After now having finished The Dubliners, I understand better of how each part fits together. The last story, “The Dead”, does a great job of tying the whole book together and bringing James Joyce’s story to a close. “The dead” recaps the themes of poverty, isolation, and mortality that were seen many times throughout The Dubliners. James Joyce uses the theme of death to portray the characters in his last tale. Even though the characters in this story are not all actually dead, they are living lives that are unfulfilling and dead-like. One example of this is the party itself. The atmosphere at the celebration is dull and monotonous. The guests have been attending the same holiday party for many years the schedule and events are the same from year to year. Another example of the “dead” in this book is Gabriel. It is true that he is still alive physically but emotionally he is not. His wife Gretta recalls her first love, Michael Furey, and tells Gabriel that he died for her. Gabriel becomes jealous of Michael Furey, but not out of his love for Gretta but out of his yearning to control Gretta’s feelings and be the only man in her life. After Gretta falls asleep, Gabriels looks out the window at the snow and ponders his life. He realizes he has never experienced love that was full of passion the way that Michael felt for Gretta. The story is left leaving the audience wondering if Gabriel will change his ways and learn to embrace and live his life to the fullest. Despite the sadness of the last story, it is the only one in the entire book that ends on a hopeful note.
ReplyDelete-Ashley Aquilino
In the final week of the "Dubliners" the story that really sticks out to me is "A Mother". In this story, a mother, who many would consider as a feminist, is determined to get her daughter paid for her piano services in a concert. I find this interesting because in the beginning of the story, the only thing the mother was concerned about was a great concert and having a great turnout for it. Somewhere in the story, the attention turns from putting all her time and energy in the concert to collecting her daughter's money. In doing so, she really does more harm than good. By demanding that her daughter get paid and not allowing her to play until she gets her money, she ruins her daughter's future and career in the city. Like mother in this story, there are many real life situations like this that occur every day. My parents, not just mothers, try to help their kids in certain areas and are really doing nothing but making the situation worse than what it already is. Though their intentions may be good, the turnout is not. The mother in the story gets so wrapped up in the money she totally forgets about what she is doing to her daughter and what this might do to her image. By doing what she does, it really hurts not just her and her daughter, but their family's image as a whole.
ReplyDeletePosted by: Kris Braxton
This week we finished off the Dubliners. Now having finished it I like the stories more. I know there are still a lot of underling meanings behind them, but they are god stories. “The Dead” was the last story in the book. Makes sense right? In this story Joyce has a character at a party which he goes to every year. They guests do the same thing over and over and he even gives just about the same speech he always does. He tells a story about a horse that was stuck in the same routine going around a statue. This miniature story inside the story showed what Joyce was trying to say about Ireland and its people. The character see’s his beautiful wife standing on a stair case and finds her more beautiful then even, but she is not thinking about him. When he got her home and all she could talk about was the dead man I think it made the character really think. It was the ending The Dubliners really needed because I believe this character is the only character that is going to change.
ReplyDeleteI agree a lot with Leah about being ready to move on to Angelas Ashes , but I do think The Dubliners was a really good book. I agree that we are in a different time generation so it really did add to the difficulty of understanding the stories. I also agree with Leah about how this was truly the only hopeful story in the entire book. It is the only story where it could possibly turn out to have a happy ending. Not just people falling into the same routine.
After reading the “Dubliners”, I have seen that all of Joyce’s characters are living undesirable lifestyles and wish for better luck or a better life, but are still inactive about changing things for themselves. They never change their day to day routine and rather than breaking away from it and finding something better, they continue to get sucked into their daily cycles because that is what is familiar to them. Breaking away from the same old things is harder to do than never changing anything, and I think that these characters are too stagnant and not ambitious enough to want to change their lives, yet they are all so unhappy. At the end of each story each character has an epiphany, but all of these epiphanies are depressing and still make it seem like the character realizes what they are doing to themselves, but show no action of change. The last story, “The Dead”, was different from the rest by having a more positive realization at the end. Gabriel seemed to be able to have the motive to change things with his wife and be able to live a little more, but still we will never know how things will end up for him.
ReplyDeleteIn response to jebediah, I would say that the reoccurring end-of-story thoughts are epiphanies. These characters suddenly realize why they are so unhappy and have the opportunity to change their situations in life, but like every story we have read, these characters never change.
I am happy to say that we have finally finished "Dubliners." After finishing the novel, and having extensive discussions in class about it, I feel that the novel had some central themes, or "public" themes as Professor Howard called them. Paralyzation in the lives of the characters seemed prevalent among the stories. The book started with "The Sisters," where a priest is actually physically paralyzed. Then in "Eveline," the female lead character is "paralyzed" with the thoughts and fear of leaving Ireland, even though it has little to offer her. But then at the end, "The Dead" brings inspiration to a man and lets him realize his potential beyond the "paralyzation" of his city. Along the theme of paralyzation, the characters were also very stuck in their ways. An example of this was “A Mother.” “A Mother” was one of my favorite stories in the novel and showed a mother who had always been selfish and snobby towards everything in her life. She had somehow contracted her daughter to a series of concerts and became angry when the found the concerts not to her social standards. At the last concert, in her selfish and childish way, she demanded her daughter be paid immediately or she would not be allowed to finish the concert. Her daughter’s future career was ruined because of a stubborn mother.
ReplyDeleteTo comment on Alex Rhode’s post, I agree that the longer story helped us understand “The Dead” better. But I have to say that for the last half of the book, the stories got progressively longer and more detailed. So to say the least, I enjoyed the last half of the book much more than the first.
~Linsey Fisher
After finishing in the book “The Dubliners”, it was very apparent that there was a theme with each and every story. The stories all ended in a way that it seemed that there was no hope for the characters. There was nothing happy or nothing good to come out of any of them. This is ok at first, because that is how life is, not all things have a happy ending. This was the style of James Joyce. When you read “different” stories with the same storyline or same outcome, the stories begin to get boring really quick. I just got tired of him whining about things over and over. In every story, there was some type of hidden symbolism that was also hard to pick up on; for me at least. On top of that, I did not really care for his style of writing either. I know due to the time the book was wrote that you could publish some things, but it was annoying in a way. I made me think, was I right or wasn’t I, which was aggravating. The only story out of this that was different was “The Dead”. With the last closing pages, it was seeming that the main character could change his life around for the better, and that is what made is a little more interesting that the others. In response to Alex and Kris, I agree when you both said that the story the "The Dead” was better due to its length. Having a longer story does make it easier to comprehend a little better; you can see the view from their shoes. With all the short stories, you get just a little of what is going on and then its onto the next story. In the send it made them seem pointless. Big deal, he hid the meaning of how bad his country was, I just got old.
ReplyDeleteIn the Dubliners Joyce tried to instill in us the fact that the Irish were being held down by something. This “thing” that was holding them down, was none other than themselves. They truly were paralyzed, even in death. Joyce points this out very clearly in his last story “The Dead”. He shows that living a short life is better than being paralyzed through a long and empty. Finally someone got this in the story and may make a move to change his life for the better. Joyce may have made a small reference to the death of the paralyzation that was gripping Ireland, in “The Dead”. This may be grasping at straws, but in all of Joyce’s stories, there was a small glimmer of hope. Even the characters noticed it was there, even if they didn’t care enough to even pay it attention. As we finished the book off, I am very happy to see why we read it, even if it was boring and hard to read. I do agree with Alex about the book. “The Dead” was probably the best and the most detailed story in the book. Because of the length, I believe it allowed most of us to understand the story better and to get more involved in it. I am looking forward to seeing Angela’s Ashes description of the same time to see if Joyce really was just over exaggerating all the details of the time period.
ReplyDeleteThis week we finished The Dubliners. This was a very different book than others that I've read, and I'm glad we read it. James Joyce is an exceptional writer; very colorful and detailed. I loved the way he carried certain themes throughout the entire book. The pain of Ireland was shown in a variety of short stories. Whether it be blinding alcoholism, dire desperation for money, or their routine ways, there were many themes that stuck out and opened my eyes to the depression that occurred during that time in Ireland. The reoccurring characters were also thoughtfully scripted. We can't forget, nothing Joyce does is unintentional. I did like the book, although I found it to be extremely repetitive. The final short story, "The Dead", really wrapped up the whole book. What a perfect title. Poverty, isolation and mortality- three of the underlining themes in the book- were all shown in this final story. In it, the annual dinner party consists of dreadening routines that make their existance so lifeless- Gabriels toast, Freddy Malines arrives drunk, everyone dances the same steps to the same songs, and everyone eats. I think "The Dead" balances the first story, "The Sisters". When we were told in class that the more times you the read this book, the more you get out of it, I can completely see how that could be true. Even re-reading a paragraph to better grasp the meaning, I could make more sense of it.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Leah's blog, I agree that "The Dead" was the only story that had any sign of hope. And that I too, am ready to move on to Angela's Ashes. Short stories have such deep meanings to them that take several re-readings to fully grasp, and maybe this novel will be more easy to comprehend with its length.