Form Is Content

Experimenting and innovation in form mark the major features of James Joyce's works. He expressed in Samuel Beckett's voice his idea of form that form is content and content is form. But critics didn't pay much attention to the form in his works until the publishing of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, especially that of Ulysses. As for Dubliners, his collection of short stories, it has long been viewed as naturalistic, being neglected of its symbolic techniques. In fact, Joyce has always valued the function of form in expressing meanings. The deceptively simple language forms in Dubliners are no weaker than the seemingly unreadable ones in Finnegans Wake. The present thesis gives a more complete analysis of Dubliners, taking Halliday's theory of three metafunctions as its theoretical framework, intending to disclose how the author reveals the major themes and achieves the artistic values of the work through carefully choosing language forms.Firstly, the thesis analyzes the transitivity system of the work, disclosing the power relation between human beings, ideology and human beings, and, human beings and the unanimated world from the perspective of the ideational meaning. That all the Dubliners are on the lower and inferior side in all these relations shows their powerlessness to act and protest, thus disclosing the themes of paralysis and death. Power relation is also revealed in the interpersonal meaning and the analysis of the interpersonal meaning of the narratives and dialogues in the work affirms the paralytic and apathetic state of Dubliners. Besides lacking actions, Dubliners are also unable to communicate, as is from the analysis of the speech roles in the dialogues. Frustration both in verbal and behavioral interactions contributes to the "epiphany" of the protagonists. As for the textual meaning, reference, repetition and collocation serves as the major means to realize it, as is analyzed in chapter five of the thesis. It is these means that achieve the wholeness and unity of the work in themes, structure and the writing techniques.