Dubliners Genre

Modernism

When you hear the name James Joyce, the first word that should come to your mind is Modernism. And while his later works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegan's Wake go really crazy with the radical literary techniques of the genre, Dubliners is where it all begins.

One of the key characteristics of Modernism is a kooky sense of narration. See, unlike in fiction written in previous dusty centuries, Joyce uses multiple narrative points of view within the single collection, switching from the first person in the first three stories to the third person omniscient limited point of view later. And that third person limited omniscient point of view can jump from one character to another in the course of a single story, which allows Joyce to explore the feelings of two different characters in a story without giving up the realism that a fully omniscient narrator just can't bring out.