Otherness in James Joyce’s Dubliners

We normally think of towns and cities as centres of lively commerce, loci of cultural exchanges, sites of artistic experiments and risk-taking ventures.None of these activities, however, have a place in the city of Dublin as portrayed in James Joyce's Dubliners.That work reveals his native city as the very antithesis of the vibrancy and intermingling of cultures that one would expect from a metropolis with more than a millennium of history behind it.His Dublin is beset by stagnation, its people suffering from what he called 'paralysis', an inability to recognize the insidious stasis that binds them and a failure to reach beyond it. 1)This Zeitgeist is minutely captured in Dubliners, a collection of fifteen short stories about the city and its residents at the end of the nineteenth century, which portrays the lives of young and old, middle class and working class, lay and clerical, sophisticated and uneducated, Catholic and Protestant.A motley bunch, they include priests, Protestants, politicians, policemen, a professor, a pedophile, and a poetaster.The stories deal with the darker side of life, drunkenness, bullying, child beating, suicide, exploitation of children by adults, of women by men, of workers by their employers.The fears and prejudices of these Dubliners, conveyed with an 1) In a letter to Grant Richards (May 1906) , Joyce announced: 'My intention was to write a chapter in the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis'; James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. by