A Narrative Approach To Sympathy In James Joyce's Dubliners

James Joyce's Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories which tell the routine life of the ordinary Dubliners in a realistic way. Compared with his other works, such as, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Dubliners is much simpler and more accessible. However, in the more accessible Dubliners, Joyce adopts various complicated narrative modes in these stories. The flexible narrative strategies contribute a great deal to the emotional engagement of the reader in the stories. The reader's curiosity is aroused; intimacy is gradually established, and sympathetic understanding is achieved in the process of reading.Taking a narrative approach to sympathy in the work, we argue that sympathy in this work does not simply stand for some kind of emotion. Neither the author's attitude nor the reader's responsive feeling is the focus of our research. Rather, we attempt to analyze the specific narrative mode and style in some representative stories in hoping to shed some light on the author's control of the reader's response. In other words, we attempt to explore how the particular narrative strategy stimulates the reader's emotional involvement in the story of the protagonist.The attempt starts with the stories with ordinary protagonists, which are analyzed under two categories, the first–person narration and the third-person narration. In both narrative modes James Joyce creates intimacy between the protagonist and the reader with his flexible narrative techniques. While taking the advantage of an innocent narrator in first-person narration, the author adopts an indifferent omniscient narrator in third-person narration to prevent the reader from deep plunges of inside view so that the reader can examine the characters while accompanying them. In the stories with unfavorable protagonists, we also detect sympathy as an emotional engagement, though it is not so obvious as in the other stories. Though the characters are to be blamed for what they have done, they are not to be condemned and dismissed by the reader, for they can, to some extent, be aware of their situation and their life. The narrator's narration concentrates on them and admits of their inside view for the sake of the close examination by the reader. The system of emotional engagement, whatever the specific emotions as a result, provides a good opportunity for the reader to "live" the stories, as it is noted by Edna O'Brien when she compared the stories with those of Chekhov: "It is not simply that they are both great, it is that they both steal into one's consciousness, so the stories are lived by us and the moments from them become part of our own experience."It may not be the best way to approach Dubliners, but the approach is challenging and effective to the understanding of the uncertainties of the fictional details and the themes.