Yellow and brown are the colors symbolic of paralysis throughout the work of James Joyce. Note, for instance, that the old men in Dubliners’ first two stories show yellow teeth when they smile. Joyce’s other image of paralysis is the circle. The race cars in “After the Race” conjure images of circular or oval tracks on which starting and finish lines are one and the same, and indeed, the story’s protagonist seems stuck in a pointless circuit of expensive schools and false friendships. In “Two Gallants” and “The Dead,” characters travel around and around, never moving truly forward, never actually arriving anywhere. Lenehan in “Two Gallants” travels in a large and meaningless loop around Dublin, stopping only for a paltry meal and ending near to where he began. He is an observer, not an actor—and an observer of a petty crime, at that. In one of the most memorable images in the entire book, Gabriel’s grandfather in “The Dead” is said to have owned a horse named Johnny who earned his keep at the family glue factory “walking round and round in order to drive the mill.” One day, according to family legend, the “old gentleman” harnessed Johnny to a carriage and led him out into the city. Upon reaching a famous statue of King William, however, the horse could not be made to proceed onward, instead plodding dumbly in an endless circle around the statue. Gabriel acts this out, circling the front hall of the Morkans’ house in his galoshes, to the delight of all. Conventionally, the circle is a symbol of life with positive connotations, as in wedding rings and Christmas wreaths. In Dubliners, however, it means an insuperable lack of progress, growth, and development. It means paralysis.
Joyce’s second great theme here is corruption; that is, contamination, deterioration, perversity, or depravity. Because corruption prevents progress, it is closely related to the theme of paralysis—and indeed, corruption is almost as prevalent in Dubliners as paralysis. Again, Joyce introduces his theme at once. In the second paragraph of “The Sisters,” the unnamed narrator mentions simony (the selling to its members by the Roman Catholic Church of blessings, pardons, or other favors), of which Father Flynn has apparently been guilty. The two stories that follow reiterate the theme. Certainly, perversity and depravity exist in “An Encounter,” just as the narrator’s unarguably pure love for Mangan’s sister in “Araby” is contaminated—and effectively paralyzed—by his uncle’s drunkenness. In fact, a subtheme of Dubliners’ first three stories, as well as “A Little Cloud,” “Counterparts,” and “A Mother” is the corruption of childhood innocence—seen in the former stories from the child’s point of view, and in the latter from the perspective of the corrupting adults.
Corruption returns in various guises throughout the book. In “The Boarding House,” Mrs. Mooney hopes to earn money from the young woman living under her roof, and thus gives Polly “the run of the young men” there. In “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” the canvassers work for money, rather than out of enthusiasm on behalf of the candidate they support, and some of them in fact seem contemptuous of that candidate. “A Mother” returns to the theme of corruption, as the concerts staged by Holohan are patriotic in nature (a celebration of Irish culture), and yet Mrs. Kearney’s only concern is the money promised to her daughter. Finally, in “Grace,” the purity of Christian faith in God clearly has been corrupted by the institution of the Catholic Church—then further corrupted by types like Kernan’s friends, who seem to mean well but misunderstand almost everything about their own faith. By discouraging him from drinking, Kernan’s friends have probably saved his life, but they have done so by means of a sort of parody of real religion.
Joyce’s third and last major theme in Dubliners is death. He links this theme closely to the prior two, and without much effort, as paralysis often precedes death, and corruption could be defined as resulting from a kind of spiritual or moral death. Once more, Joyce introduces his theme from the get-go: The events of “The Sisters” are caused by the death of Father Flynn, whose corpse the story’s boy protagonist eventually sees face to face. Deaths are also implied in this story, and in “Araby”—those of the boys’ parents, absent from both tales. Thereafter, death follows death in Dubliners: Dead is the priest who last lived in the house in “Araby”; Eveline’s mother in “Eveline”; Mrs. Mooney’s father in “The Boarding House”; Maria, perhaps, in “Clay” (the title of which symbolizes death itself); Mrs. Sinico (by suicide) in “A Painful Case”; Charles Parnell in “Ivy Day”; and finally Michael Furey and the other inhabitants of the churchyard in which he lays buried in “The Dead.” Those are only the actual deaths in the book; add spiritual and moral deaths, and Dubliners grows as crowded with corpses as the Hades episode in Homer’s Odyssey.
Paralysis, corruption, and death: In Dubliners, Joyce paints a grim picture of his hometown and its inhabitants. Keep in mind that he blamed the sorry state of affairs on outside forces—England and the church—rather than the Irish themselves. Looking back, the writer himself found the book insufficiently sympathetic to Dubliners’ best qualities (hospitality, for example). He would address this deficiency in his masterpiece, Ulysses, which itself began as an aborted Dubliners story. Before that, however, he would tell the tale of a Dublin youth who vows to escape the paralysis, corruption, and death endemic to Dublin, a character based on Joyce himself whom he called Stephen Dedalus. Dedalus would be the main character of Joyce’s thematically similar next book and his first novel: A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man.
