The search for truth or meaning in Dubliners Many of James Joyce's stories in Dubliners can be read as complaints about man's frustrating inability to represent meaning by external means, including the written word. When characters in “Araby,” “Counterparts,” and “A Painful Case” attempt to represent or signify themselves, other characters, or abstract spiritual entities with or through words, they not only fail, but end up emotionally ruined. Furthermore, the inconclusive endings of the three stories correspond to the fate of their characters. Dubliners' short lyrics imply that representing the "real" is frustrating, if not impossible. At the beginning of Dubliners, Joyce establishes the theme of emotional investment in representation. In the third story of Joyce's volume, the childhood tale "Araby," the young narrator and protagonist venerates words—written or verbal signifiers—as vessels for holding spiritual meaning. The mere pronunciation of Mangan's sister's name (which, incidentally, is never revealed in the story) serves "as an invitation to all [the narrator's] foolish blood" (25). they are repeated by the narrator to elevate and save his senses. He describes himself "muttering O love! O love! many times" (25) in the living room of his dead priest friend. While the narrator's use of words to connote external meanings is not unusual, his reverence and actual utterance of the italicized (highlighted) "O love!" demonstrate a conception of language that seems to transcend its normal connotative signifying functions. The use of words as calls to action or soul-evoking tools suggests that the narrator sees the words as semi-autonomous signs in themselves. The name of the story itself and the bazaar-in-t......middle of the card...a definable entity. Rather, “A Painful Case,” like the other two Dubliners stories, elides notions of the “real,” contextualizing the problems and insufficiencies of representation within its narrative. In “Araby,” “Counterparts,” and “A Painful Case,” the characters search for meaning in the play and end up angry, violent, and lonely. The empty pessimism of these three conclusions suggests that the function of literature may not be to articulate a coherent truth or meaning. Rather, literature as it approaches life is inconclusive, complex, and unrepresentative. Works Cited Joyce, James. Dubliners. Classic edition with seal. New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1991. Woolf, Virginia. "Modern Fiction". The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. David Daiches and Jon Stallworthy, 6th ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1993. (2:1921-26)