In the course of a night out after work, he is rebuffed by a young woman and gets defeated in an arm-wrestling competition. The story follows Little Chandler, a man who stayed in Dublin and settled down, with the life of his old friend who went to live and work in London.Ī number of Joyce’s protagonists in Dubliners are failures, and Farrington, the protagonist of ‘Counterparts’, is a failure in every aspect of his life, thanks largely to his dependency on alcohol.

Like ‘Eveline’, this is a story about escaping Dublin – or not escaping, as the case may be. Mrs Mooney reasons that, having slept with Polly, Mr Doran should make reparation for damaging her honour: he should make an honourable woman of Polly by marrying her … We discover that her daughter, Polly, who was known to flirt with the guests, had been taken advantage of by a man lodging in the boarding house. She has a steady stream of lodgers staying with her. ‘The Boarding House’ focuses on Mrs Mooney, a married woman who has separated from her violent husband, a butcher, and set up a boarding house on Hardwicke Street in Dublin. A powerful story about the loss of idealism among young to middle-aged Irishmen at the beginning of the twentieth century. It centres on two Irishmen, one of whom arranges to meet a woman he wishes to seduce, while the other reflects on his plans to marry a ‘simple-minded’ woman for her money.

In a letter to the published Grant Richards, Joyce called ‘Two Gallants’ one of the most important stories in Dubliners. But as so often, this brief summary of a Dubliners story doesn’t capture the suggestiveness of Joyce’s writing, or his attention to everyday detail. The story ends with the arrival of a new day, at ‘daybreak’. The protagonist, Jimmy Doyle, and his European friends walk around Dublin, go to dinner at a hotel, talk about politics and music among other things, and then catch the train to the harbour where they go to a yacht and proceed to get drunk dancing and playing cards. She wordlessly turns round and goes home, leaving Frank to board the ship alone.Īs its title suggests, ‘After the Race’ focuses on what happens after a motorcar race has finished, over the rest of the day – and throughout the same night. But as she is just about to board the ship, Eveline suffers a failure of resolve, and cannot go through with it. Eveline is tired of this life, and so she and Frank book onto a ship leaving for Argentina.

Dubliners joyce