Escape

James Joyce is considered as one of the outstanding influences on literature in the 20^th century. Dubliners was his first successful book. Dubliners is a collection of short stories about life among various kinds of Dubliners. The fifteen stories in Dubliners are not simply a collection of short stories but it has a definite structure, and interweaving, recurring symbols. As Joyce stated his overall purpose and design of writing the stories, he intended to write a moral history of Ireland. He tried to reveal the moral sickness of Irish society through the four aspects of "childhood, adolescence, maturity and public live". The fifteen stories are independent and correlated revealing the physical and mental paralysis of Dubliners through their lives from childhood to adulthood. Dubliners extracts Joyce's contemplation on life and society. Compared with Joyce's other works, in addition to innovative forms, Dubliners explores the social issues, religious issues and familiar issues that Joyce explores in his other works and their depth is no less shallow that other works. Therefore, it is fair to say that Joyce's later works were created on the base of his early points of view and artistic features of his early works. Dubliners is an indispensable part of Joyce's literature and his artistic thinking.This thesis explores one of the themes of James Joyce's Dubliners - Escape and fail to escape. The thesis analyzes one of the stories from each four sections of Dubliners: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life and finds that although characters vary in age, gender, social status, education background and so on, all long to escape into another world. The little boy in Araby is keen to escape into romantic love. The protagonist in Eveline feels an urge to escape into her possible new life brought by the marriage proposed. Chandler in A Little Cloud is eager to escape into in artistic world. Gabriel in The Dead wants to escape into the world of the dead The escapes take different forms but all end up with failure, with which the protagonists realize their predicament and are struck by the epiphany to understand the essence of life.