Dubliners

[Cool78]

Hello,

please,could You give me any tips for my essay: Moral Paralysis in Dubliners.
For example:Who,from the characters is morally paralysed and why or why is moral paralysis key word of the book etc.

I will be very gratefull for You help
Have a nice day.

[KidTruth]

Any given main character in any of the dozen short stories is suffering from moral paralysis.

The concept is that this is a city full of people who have trapped themselves with their own mindsets (hence, paralysis.) Each of them desperately wants to change - to have that one moment that is iconic to short stories where they have a sublime ephiphany regarding life and come out of it knowing exactly what to do.

In The Dubliners, the characters have these epiphanies, but then go on living exactly the way that they were. This is what James Joyce saw as a youth growing up in Dublin.

The truth that Joyce is hitting on here is that no matter what you do, sometimes you're just stuck. For instance in The Dead - the main character realizes that he is competing for the love of his wife with a dead man whose passion he will never be able to match.

If this man possessed the passion to do something as noble and romantic as catching his death in order to see his wife, he might be able to escape this moral paralysis. However, the man he is competing with is long gone, and so there is no real way he can succeed in this battle - hence, he's paralysed.