Less Is More?Ellipsis In James Joyce's Dubliners

Dubliners is James Joyce's only short story collection and is famous for its extraordinarily beautiful prose and scrupulously mean style.A technique frequently adopted in the book is ellipsis.Focusing on this technique,the paper aims to clarify its usage and significance in Dubliners,and analyze how ellipsis helps to convey the theme of paralysis.Ellipsis originally means the omission of words or phrases in a sentence,or the narrative movement when the narrative time is zero while the story time is infinitely long.This paper borrows the term to indicate a broader domain,namely any gap in the text or the narration.Using the analytical tool of narratology and stylistics,the paper locates three different forms of ellipsis:ellipsis in the layout of the text,in dialogue,and in plot.These ellipses constitute a response-inviting structure,luring the reader to dig into and seek from it.Through ellipsis and the reader's participation,the powerlessness of the characters and the senselessness of life in Dublin are presented,thus the theme of paralysis better illustrated.To draw a full picture of ellipsis,the paper is divided into three chapters.Chapter one centers around ellipsis in the layout of the text,namely a line of dots appearing in some stories of the book that cut the text into halves.This leads to a breakup in text arrangement,in narration,as well as in the reading process.From the context the reader can infer what is lost without suspension.The fact that certain parts of the story will be taken for granted and thus unnecessary to mention indicates a hopeless situation faced by the characters.Chapter two analyzes the dialogue in Dubliners,detecting pause,irrelevance,and silence as three specific forms.The ellipses create "noise" to the communication,thus hinder the natural flow of emotion and efficient exchange of information,making the process of communication rather difficult and the relationship between characters hard to progress.Chapter three deals with ellipsis in the plot.Some stories lack a premise or necessary transition,so that the reader is unable to make sense of some parts of the plot.But because of the omission of certain parts,the reader is invited to dig deeper into the psychology of characters,and understand their hidden desire and fear.