Dubliners, a collection of shorts stories, by James Joyce, is centered around the everyday lives of ordinary people in Dublin, Ireland. According to Joyce himself, his intention was to "write a chapter of the moral history of [his] country and [he] chose Dublin for the scene because the city seemed to [be] the center of paralysis" (439). Each of the fifteen stories are accounts of disappointment, darkness, captivity, and frustration. The book is divided into four parts: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. The stories reveal Joyce's feelings that Dublin is the personification of paralysis and the citizens are victims. Although each story from Dubliners is a unique and separate portrayal, they all have similarities with each other. The first three stories, The Sisters, An Encounter, and Araby parallel each other in many ways, they can be seen as a set in and of themselves. The purpose of this essay is to explore one particular similarity is order to prove !

that the childhood stories can be seen as a specific section of Dubliners. I will demonstrate that the idea of being held capti

In, The Sisters, Father Flynn plays an important role in making the narrator feel like a prisoner. Mr. Cotter's comment that "...a young lad [should] run about and play with young lads of his own age..." (10) suggests that the narrator has spent a great deal of time with the priest. Even in death, the boy cannot free himself from the presence of Father Glynn as is shown in the next passage: "But the grey face still followed me. It murmured; and I understood that it desired to confess something. I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region; and there again I found it waiting for me" (11). The boy feels the need to get away from the priest, but this proves to be impossible. No matter where he ran, the priest was still there - haunting him. In fact, even before the narrator is thoroughly convinced that the priest is dead, he is worried that Father Flynn will haunt him. "In the dark of my room I imagined that I saw the heavy grey face of the paralytic. I d!

ve by religion is felt by the central character of each story. In this paper, I argue that because religion played such a significant role in the lives of the middle class, it was something that many citizens felt was suffocating and from which it was impossible to get away. Each of the three stories uses religion to keep the narrator captive.

s on him, he feels enraged and disgusted.

on page 320: The interior of the building is like a church. The great central hall, circled at half its height by a gallery, contains dark stalls, dim lights, and curtained, jar-flanked sanctuaries. Joyce wants us to regard this temple as a place of worship. Even the narrator proves this symbolism when he says "I recognize a silence like that which pervades a church after a service" (34). The narrator's trip to the bazaar is a journey but even at the bazaar he cannot escape the image of the Virgin Mary. He sees a young lady standing at the opening of a booth, flirting with two men. This is paralleled by the image of Mangan's sister standing in her

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Approximate Word count = 1370
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)