In a list published by an American specialized magazine, which ranked the best short stories of the 20th century, the story chosen as the best was ‘The Dead’ by James Joyce, and there are plenty of reasons for this choice. ‘The Dead’ is the final story in the volume ‘Dubliners’ and differs from the other stories both in its greater length and its poetic intensity and symbolism. The central theme here is the mortality of the human being, which is suggested from the title. But it encompasses much more than that. The description of the New Year's Eve party is a clear example of Joyce's skill in depicting scenes, highlighting aspects that seem of no importance. The complexity that Joyce was able to infuse into his masterpiece ‘Ulysses’ is well known, but the story ‘The Dead, ‘ with its simplicity, is proof of the enormous versatility and talent of this great writer.
Sobre el autor
James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish writer. He is the author of ‘Ulysses, ‘ considered to be the work that inaugurated the modern novel and one of the most important in Western literature.
Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland, on February 2, 1882. The son of a wealthy Catholic family, he received a strict education from Jesuit priests, against which he later rebelled. He attended the University of Dublin, where he studied English, French, and Italian, and participated in literary and theatrical groups.
In 1902, he went to Paris to study medicine, but the following year, after his mother’s death, he returned to Ireland. He worked as a private tutor, then moved to Zurich and later to Trieste, Italy, where he supported himself by teaching English.
His early literary experiences were conservative, marked by the influence of Ibsen’s realism and the symbolists. This is evident in his first book, ‘Chamber Music, ‘ a collection of poems published in 1907. In 1914, he published the ‘Dubliners’ collection of short stories, and in 1916, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘ a reflection on his childhood and adolescence in Dublin.
In 1922, Joyce published ‘Ulysses, ‘ a novel set on a single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin. Its characters, Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom, face situations corresponding to episodes from Homer’s Odyssey. In this work, Joyce reinvented language and syntax, radicalizing narrative language by exploring processes of image association, verbal resources, stylistic parodies, and stream of consciousness. He also incorporated Freudian psychoanalytic theories on sexual behavior. The book was banned in the United Kingdom and the United States until 1936.
Joyce underwent several surgeries due to vision problems. His final work, ‘Finnegans Wake’ (1939), pushed the aesthetic and linguistic innovations presented in ‘Ulysses’ to their ultimate limits.
James Joyce passed away in Zurich, Switzerland, on January 13, 1941.
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