He mourns on his hopelessness, saying, “when the restraining influence of the school was at a distance I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me… I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. The narrator feels caught in the dull ordinary everyday practice of school and needed to encounter an experience like that in the Wild West stories he peruses. We are being told the story through the young boys biased and innocent mind, but slowly see more of the reality when we hear from Old Cotter and the sisters of Father Flynn.Īn Encounter, describes a young man’s exasperating experience with an unusual elderly person. Now, the narrator slowly is beginning to realize that everyone has their own perspective on life, nobody is ever going to one hundred percent understand your specific experiences as well as you do. While this constituted as strictly childlike, it does illustrate the Modernist themes of alienation through how the character is feeling. He finds, that despite everything he once knew was changing right before him, the rest of the world remain unaffected, commenting “I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death” (Joyce). When his friend and religious mentor, Father Flynn, passes away suddenly and he is given the choice to view his body, he does not know to comprehend the situation, and goes on a walk instead: “I wished to go in and look at him but I had not the courage to knock” (Joyce). In The Sisters, the young narrator highlights the disconnect between individual perception and reality.

Overall, Dubliners shows childhood as a condition of not fully understanding the world around them. The boys can only view the world through what they know, which is not a lot considering they are quite young. The children experience and view life differently than adults do, a common theme in Modernist literature. The narrators’ slowly begin to realize that everyone has their own perspective on life, nobody is ever going to one hundred percent understand your specific experiences as well as you do. The first section of the book Dubliners by James Joyce, revolves around childhood and how, regardless of age, all the children experience feelings of disillusionment, alienation, and entrapment within their lives. These stories illustrate the Modernist themes of alienation through how the character is feeling. Focusing on the stages of life from childhood to youth and then adulthood. In Dubliners, he chronicles the lives of the people of Dublin. Author James Joyce incorporates the modernist style of writing and point of view in his short stories, The Sisters, An Encounter, and Araby.

James joyce's