The Impressionist Features In Dubliners

James Joyce has been celebrated as one of the greatest and the most influential Irish Novelists duringthe twentieth century. Many of his works are reputed as classics in the history of English literature. Hecontributes a lot to the development of modernist literature by his special and unique artistic writing skills.The purpose of this thesis is to explore the impressionist features in Dubliners so as to show Joyce’sgreat achievements in the literary innovation and experimentation. As a new way to understand the world,impressionism first manifest itself in the field of painting, and then it expands to literature and other fieldsfrom19thcentury in the western world. The impressionists are committed to describing the vagueness andtransient impressions and pay more attention to construct impressionist pictures through colors, sensationsand images and combine the fragmentation with the main clue to keep the balance between the detailedfragments and the overall structure.The research demonstrates that the impressionist features in Dubliners mainly find expression infour aspects: impressionistic colors, impressionistic sensations, impressionistic images and impressionisticcomposition. In Dubliners, Joyce firstly employs the colors to form the impressionistic atmosphere andbuild different kinds of characters, which appropriately embodies the protagonist’s feelings and gives anew subjective meaning to colors. Secondly, Joyce attaches importance to the pursuit of sensory effects.Through describing sense of hearing, he presents vividly the complicated inner world of the characters andreveals that the sense is a bridge connecting the outside world and the interior reality. Thirdly, Joyce alsoconstructs a picture of theses paralyzed Dubliners with the representative impressionistic images such as“light”,“bar”,“window” and “snow”. These images give a full expression of the theme and provide a freshway to understand the context incisively. Finally, Joyce manages to form the inner unity of Dubliners byemploying the short thick strokes of the impressionism to juxtapose some fragmentary scenes. Throughstudying the impressionist features in Dubliners, this thesis can make some contributions to appreciateDubliners from the perspective of aesthetics and it can also provide readers a new viewpoint to taste the profound meaning of Dubliners.