Life and Death in Joyce\u27s Dubliners

This thesis is an examination of James Joyce\u27s Dubliners as a collection of stories that is unified by an ongoing intersection between life and death. In the collection, the dead often serve to expose a deficiency in the living. The thesis explores four stories that share this theme in particular: \u27The Sisters,\u27 \u27A Painful Case,\u27 \u27Ivy Day in the Committee Room,\u27 and \u27The Dead.\u27 Each story is also presented in the context of how each relates to the progression from youth to public life within Dubliners. As such, the thesis also considers how Dubliners exhibits a progression towards isolation and paralysis in the living until the final story, \u27The Dead,\u27 which marks a reversal of this trend. Thus, \u27The Dead\u27 is interpreted as a positive, hopeful ending to the bleak collection, and such an interpretation resolves the ambiguity of the story and reinterprets its role as a conclusion to Dubliners. Furthermore, other themes and motifs that have been observed by critics are also examined in this thesis, including silences, communions, drinking, and the Oriental trend to the collection