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Use Of Irony Disconnect In James Joyce's Dubliners

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Use Of Irony Disconnect In James Joyce's Dubliners
In James Joyces Dubliners the use of irony and sensory disconnect are what structure the recurring themes of the stories. The themes include entrapment, with escaping routine life for its horrors, misery, and agony. The stories Eveline, Araby, A Painful Case, and The Dead all end in epiphany. Dubliners experience a climactic moment in their lives to bring them change, freedom and happiness, although these moments bring none of those. All characters fall into paralysis from not being able to leave lives of promises, marriage, children, love, and religion that ironically entrapped them. Its almost as if the Dubliners are prisoners in life, except the prison is Dublin and the inmates are entrapped souls that live a lifeless wonder to the reader. …show more content…
In Eveline, Eveline must leave and awaken to a new life with Frank to escape the one her mother lived, which she describes as, that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness. (40) Ironically though its her promise to her mother that keep her from beginning a new life and entrapped in the one she most agonizingly fears. In Eveline, sensory disconnect exists as well. The window with the odour of dusty cretonne is a symbol of escape, Eveline constantly turns to it to reflect upon herself and her situation; James Joyce uses the window as a gateway to the outside world as seen in other stores such as Araby, to see the lives of …show more content…
The narrator is entrapped in his own life, not being able to express his own love, making all the possible connections in his mind but thinking they will all fail, he cannot express what he feels to this religious girl, as religion serves as a theme in Araby. There is also a biblical reference in sensory disconnect to Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge: The wild garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few straggling bushes under one of which I found the late tenant 's rusty bicycle-pump. (29) Here the tree represents Adam and Eve and love, where the rusty bicycle pump represents ageing, not being given attention to for so long being lonely under the tree, the narrators destiny. A greater irony comes towards the end when his adventure is shown to be just a shopping trip; and Araby, just a local market. There is no Middle Eastern theme of Arabia, more like the average market you find in Dublin as James Joyce describes. "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." (35) There is irony her because, the boy hasn 't discovered himself. He 's just as independent, alone, and blind in the end as he was at the
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