Essay on Spiritual Poverty in James Joyces Dubliners -- Dubliners Es

Spiritual Poverty Exposed in The Dubliners Joyce describes the spiritual scantness of the people of Dublin in the industrial age, with powerful images of mechanized humans and animated machines. In After the Race and Counterparts he delineates characters with appropriate portraits of human automation. Machines conquer human attributes and vitality in opposition to the vacuous citizens of Irelands capitalist city. Joyces use of metaphorical language brings to life the despair of his country. In Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson writes an allegorical account of the disaster of mankind (1919). Although Anderson depicts rural life in the New World, his understanding of human nature and descriptive terminology provide a valuable framework for examining Joyces version of urban misery in the Old World. The Book of the Grotesque, the opening piece of Andersons short story collection, animates the thoughts of a dying old man It was his notion that the wink one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood. (24, Penguin Edition). This notion, that belief in a single truth or paradigm distorts people such that they become warped and can no longer function as human, is fundamental to Joyces characterizations of the Dubliners. Twentieth Century Homo sapiens can be distinguished from machines by their potential to think openly and consider myriad brains without being paralyze by a singular absolute. When people clutch an idea and transform it into an ideal, the separation between man and machine becomes blurred. Human automatons mechanically follow the programming of their truth. In A... ... demands that he find an outlet for his frustration, and he beats his child to slake the strange thirst for violence of an alcoholic. When an individual seizes a single idea or paradigm they loose their humanity and assume the form of a grotesque machine. Joyces characterizations of mechanical people and animate machines in The Dubliners follow this philosophy as presented by Sherwood Anderson, and reinforce its applicability. Dubliners are anesthetized by their truths and experience a paralysis of their human possibilities. Only dull machinery remains. This machinery is then capable of great inhumanity as it follows the scripture of its truth. Alcoholics can beat children, Capitalists can ravage countries, and Nationalists can fight wars (religious or profane) to exterminate other ethnicities. Works CitedJoyce, James Dubliners, New YorkPenguin, 1993.