This is a repeating event- Event 1 / 32 December 2025 5:30 pm
James Joyce short stories from Dubliners - The Dead & The Sisters
Event Details
One would not usually dare suggest reading the final paragraph of any work first, but in this case nothing is given away. Just know that the power and resonant beauty of this paragraph is immeasurably increased when you arrive here through the journey of the story.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
James Joyce, The Dead
The stories in Dubliners (1914) provide a rich feast through which to taste the world of James Joyce. In both The Sisters and The Dead, the stories which bookend the collection, Joyce seeks flashes of illumination – epiphanies – when clarity is suddenly attained, not in occasions of great victory or of obvious importance, but in mundane moments when pieces fall into place and profound truths are revealed.
Nothing – NOTHING – in Joyce is casual. Each image, reference, description carries symbolic resonance. Career Joyce scholars may try to align all the references, but I like W. Tindall’s attitude:
“The text is not a system of mathematical equations but a flexible relationship of possibilities . . .”
William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce
JOINING DETAILS:
- Live online study, three meetings led by Toby Brothers and Paul Caviston
- Tuesdays, 25 November, 2 & 9 December 2025, 5.30-7.30 pm (GMT)
- £120 for three meetings, including opening notes and background resources
- Recommended edition: Dubliners by James Joyce, Penguin Modern Classics, ISBN: 9780141182452
