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BEJAN DIANA GABRIELA

ANUL III , ROMANA-ENGLEZA

Restanta CP literatura engleza anul III sem 1

Descovering themes and motifs in James Joyces

The Dead and Ulysses

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Descovering themes and motifs in James Joyces

The Dead and Ulysses

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and

inform the texts major themes.

This essay tries to uncover themes and motifs in two literary works by JamesJoyce: The Dead a short story,published in his collectionDubliners (1914) and Ulysses

a novel that is considered by many critics an excelent work of fiction which not only

fundamentally redefined the novel as a genre, but pushed the limits of the English

language itself.Joyce first conceived ofUlysses as a short story to be included inDubliners, but

decided instead to publish it as a long novel, situated as a sort of sequel toA Portrait of

the Artist as a Young Man. InDubliners, Joyce had tried to give his stories a heightened

sense of realism by incorporating real people and places into them, and he pursues thesame strategy on a massive scale in Ulysses.

The title ofThe Deadhighlights its major theme:death and the dead.This shortstory tries to show the reader that a death faced courageously creates a greater impression

upon the living than death through progressive decay.

This is a passage that attests the existence of the theme:One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in

the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

Dead people play an important role in the story.Gabriel honors them in the speech

he gaves after-dinner, and several dead characters are mentioned as the story proggresis:Ellen (Gabriel's mother), Pat Morkan (his uncle), Patrick Morkan (his grandfather), and

Michael Furey.Another reminder of death comes in the dinnertime discussion of amonastery whose monks sleep in coffins. The dead from the title are both those whoare literally deceased and those who are merely going through the motions of living but

who are spiritually dead.

When describing his intentions in writingDubliners, Joyce said that the city ofDublin seemed to him the center of paralysis. By paralysis Joyce meant the inability to

act, move, or grow beyond where one is spiritually and emotionallythe inability to live

fully.Thus one other theme in The Deadis paralysis.Gabriel is described as being

paralyzed by his self-consciousness. He is self-conscious about Lily's bitter remarks onmarriage and about what he should say in his after-dinner speech. When Miss Ivors

accuses him of being loyal to the British, he tries to avoid confrontation. He doesn't want

to risk a grandiose phrase toward her in a room full of people. He fantasizes aboutusing his speech to criticize Miss Ivors, but by the time he gives it she is gone, and he

gives a speech that only serves to please his audience. The story Gabriel tells about

Patrick Morkan's horse walking in circles around the statue of King William III suggestsIreland's spiritual paralysis, and Gabriel shows his own paralysis by walking in a circle

himself while telling it. Finally, as he and Gretta are walking down the street to find a

cab, he imagines himself making various romantic overtures to her, but he actually makesnone of them.

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Another important theme in The Deadis self-realization.Through the story

Gabriel is a self-absorbed person who mostly cares about how he comes across to others.

He doesn't care about the feelings of others so much as he cares about how he looks. Forinstance, when Lily angrily tells him that all young men are palaver and what they can

get out of you, Gabriel feels that he made a mistake with her. Instead of apologizing,

however, he gives her money and tells her that they are a Christmas present. Later in thestory, after Gretta tells him about Michael Furey, Gabriel is able to suddenly step back

and look at himself and his relationship to his wife and others.

The motif that helps this theme develop,in my opinion is the epiphany.All thestories inDubliniers (asAraby,Eveline,A Little Cloud,A Painful Case, The Dead)

conclude with epiphanies that the characters fully register, yet these epiphanies are filled

with frustration, sadness, and regret.At the end ofThe Dead, Gabriels revelation clarifies

the connection between the dead and the living, an epiphany that resonates throughoutDubliners as a whole. The epiphany motif highlights the repeated routine of hope and

passive acceptance that marks each of these portraits, as well as the general human

condition.

Other motif that one could uncouver is betrayl. Deception, deceit, and treacheryare in nearly every relationship in the stories inDubliners, demonstrating the unease with

which people attempt to connect with each other, both platonically and romantically.Inour short story Gabriel feels betrayed by his wifes emotional overflow for a former

lover. This feeling evoques not only the sense of displacement and humiliation that all of

these Dubliners fear but also the tendency for people to categorize many acts asbetrayal in order to shift blame from themselves onto others.

The Dead deals with two other theme that could be categorized as

social-political: provincial culture vs. European culture and British rule vs. Irish

nationalism.The first one is strongly connected with the setting ofThe Deadthat coincides

with a period of revival of Irish culture. People wanted to revive Irish music, art, and

language.It is known that for much of its history, Ireland has been dominated by British

rule, and the debate between independence and allegiance to Britain appears in The Dead,

and this could be introduced in the theme of British rule vs. Irish nationalism. The Deadencapsulates the themes developed in the entire collection of James

Joyces stories and also serves as a balance to the first story, The Sisters.

Just like in The Dead, we encounter in Ulysses the theme of death. Stephen

Dedalus's mother has died between the end ofA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

and the opening ofUlysses, and he is tormented by feelings of remorse and guilt because

he refused to pray over her before she passed. Leopold Bloom is a man who is in a sense

living between two deaths his father has committed suicide, and his son Rudy died overten years ago, at the age of just eleven days. Thus the characters in the book are

intimately aware of what a fleeting thing life is, and we are exposed to a great deal of

their thoughts surrounding human mortality.Another theme in Ulysses is prejudice against Jews. Leopold Bloom, the main

character in Ulysses, is an Irishman. But in 1904 Dublin there are a lot of people that

would not have thought so. The reason is that Bloom is also a Jew, and Jews were looked

on as being somehow different a separate (and inferior) race. The fact that Joyce makes

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the hero of his great Irish novel a Jew is a case of him stirring up a fuss.Anti-Semitism

was common throughout Europe, and Ireland was no exception. Throughout the novel,

other characters speak disparagingly of Jews and Bloom does his best to stand up forthem. This theme looks a lot like the theme of British rule vs. Irish nationalism from The

Dead. Ulysses depicts the Irish citizens of 1904, especially Stephen Dedalus, and how

they feel about their own Irishness, and complex relationships with various authoritiesand institutions specific to their time and place: the British empire, Irish nationalism, the

Roman Catholic church, and the Irish Literary Revival.

The motif of light and darkness supports this theme.Traditionaly light isassociated with good and dark with bad ,but in Ulysses, the two protagonists are dressed

in mourning black, and some of the menacing characters are associated with light and

brightness.This reversal cames from Mr. Deasys anti-Semitic stand, that Jews have

sinned against the light. Deasy is associated with the brightness of coins, representingwealth without spirituality. Blazes Boylan, Blooms nemesis, is associated with

brightness through his name and his flashy behavior, again suggesting surface without

substance. Blooms and Stephens dark colors suggest a variety of associations:

Jewishness, anarchy or the outsider/wanderer status. Ulysses is a book about Stephens search for a symbolic father and Blooms

search for a son.The plot of this novel parallels Telemachuss search for Odysseus, andvice versa, in The Odyssey.Thus,In my opinion the major theme in Ulysses is the quest

for paternity. Stephen already has a biological father, Simon Dedalus, but considers him a

father only in flesh. Stephen feels that his own ability to mature and become a father

himself,is restricted by Simons criticism and lack of understanding. So Stephen issearching for a symbolic father who will, in turn, allow Stephen himself to be a father.

The quest seems to end in Blooms kitchen, with Bloom recognizing the future in

Stephen and Stephen recognizing the past in Bloom. Though united as father and sonin this moment, the men will soon part ways, and their paternity quests will continue,

because in Ulysses Joyce tries to demonstrate that the quest for paternity is a search for

ones self. The Deadand Ulysses are somehow thematically similar,both deal with

social-political themes - focusing on contemporary questions of Irish political and

cultural independence, the effects of organized religion on the soul, and the cultural andmoral decay produced economic development and heightened urbanization, and the

theme of death.

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http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/659355/an_analysis_of_themes_in_james_joyc

es.html?cat=38

http://english-learners.com/2010/10/the-dead-pdf-version-james-joyce.html

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/ulysses/themes.html

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/dubliners/section15.rhtml

http://www.storybites.com/joycedead2.htm

http://www.enotes.com/dead/themes

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