Dubliners by James Joyce/Nine Stories Reflection

Dubliners is a collection of short stories by the Irish author James Joyce. Similarly to the other collection of short stories I read earlier this year, J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories, Dubliners, rather than focusing on any particular family or series of events, is meant to evoke a time and a place. For Nine Stories, the place was the lives of the American upper-middle class, 1940s through 1950s. Dubliners crosses the Atlantic to middle-class Dublin, where everybody knows everybody and everybody is the same. The stories in these two collections are not particularly intriguing or noteworthy in any way, but the way the character's lives are painted by Salinger and Joyce makes the stories fascinating. The consciousness of the reader in "A Perfect Day For Bananafish" that something bad will happen soon is a result of the dread infused into the tale by Salinger's words. Each writer also uses the innocence of children as a device in certain stories. In Salinger's "The Laughing Man" the reader can see how the story the leader is telling reflects how his own relationship with his girlfriend is going, while the child in the story cannot connect the two instances. Likewise, the death of Father Flynn in "The Sisters" is told through the eyes of a child who knew the priest well, not to deaden the loss, but rather to enhance it. The reader and the child both realize that the priest is dead, but it is the reaction of the adults that make the story.