Every night, as I looked out the window, I quietly said the word paralysis to myself. It had always sounded strange to my ears, like the word gnomon in Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it reminded me of the name of an evil, sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be closer and contemplate its deadly work. - boy narrator, The SistersSay no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original Paralysis trial. For the characters in James Joyce's works, it is a literal force that prevents them from physically moving, from developing and maturing, from forming or honoring a truly realized sense of self. Although expressed through the immature vocabulary, naivety and limited life experience of a child, the quote above is profound for the seemingly contradictory and surprising feeling it suggests. Are Joyce's characters powerless in the face of their own lives, strangely drawn to the forces of paralysis that hold them captive? Do they simply choose to walk away from the risk, from the leap of faith that profound change requires? Or, as citizens of Dublin, of this "dear dirty city", are they victims of the fate visited upon them by their frozen metropolis, a proverbial dead end paved with the filth of immorality and invaded by the shards of broken dreams? These characters keep returning to their still, bereft state, mourning the loss of a missed opportunity or a potential never realized. Therefore, paralysis in Joyce is not only a force that prevents, deters, thwarts and frustrates. It has a more insidious effect, that of anesthesia, and a more pernicious attraction, that of the comfort that accompanies complete abandonment. In Dubliners, exemplified by stories such as “Eveline” and “The Dead,” and their instances of literal and figurative paralysis, Joyce proposes that to be truly paralyzed one must be more than simply “stuck” or immobile. The most devastating form of debilitation occurs when one is unaware of one's own frozen state. The individual is so entrenched in the pattern of paralysis that he or she cannot see beyond its iron-walled boundaries or recognize the need or call for change. His ignorance and frightening ambivalence are a double-sided bullet that pierces the heart of personal growth, self-realization and emotional fulfillment. In one of the episodes of the central “Adolescent” section of Dubliners, “Eveline” tells the story of a nineteen-year-old young man. One-year-old shop girl facing a crossroads. She is a pensive young girl, overwhelmed by memories of her childhood and by the loss of loved ones, the finality of death and the inevitability of change. The concept of “home” is very dear to Eveline, even if its fabric of stability begins to unravel. She has strong attachments to her physical surroundings, to her city of Dublin, to her house on the Avenue, as well as to the comforting memories of the children who "played together in that field - the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns, the little Keogh the cripple. “It was a simpler time for Eveline, when her mother was still alive and her father had not yet been pushed, bruised and battered by life's harsh blows into his current incarnation as a drunken, abrasive man However, as Eveline laments, things are changing and her current state is one of unhappiness and disappointment. She has taken on the role of matriarch within her household upon the death of her mother. family, to the need to meet the demanding needs of younger children - and the confluenceof these responsibilities taking place under the watchful and critical disapproving eye of her father - bring Eveline to her breaking point. Therefore, she now prepares to “leave like the others, to leave her home” and forge a new life with her lover, Frank. However, Eveline is thwarted, her authentic desires and aspirations stifled by her inner paralysis. She is fearful, uncertain about the transition from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from girl to woman, from a life of stifling obligations to a life of liberating, self-guided activity. Eveline sometimes expresses visceral ecstasy, invigorated by the prospect of becoming Frank's wife and moving with him to Buenos Aires, a city whose very name ("bon air") symbolizes freshness, newness, and rebirth. The city contrasts sharply with Eveline's ramshackle home life in Dublin, characterized by textual descriptions of her inhaling "the smell of dusty cretonne" and noting the "yellowing" of old childhood photographs. Eveline is not only unfulfilled and uninspired, but panic-stricken at the thought of following in her deceased mother's footsteps, destined to repeat or enact her pitiful life of "mundane sacrifices ending in madness final”. Eveline's interior monologue reveals the despair of her terror: escape. She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps also love. But she wanted to live. Why would she be unhappy? She had the right to happiness. Frank took her in his arms, folded her in his arms. He would save her. However, what prevents Eveline from achieving total happiness, from reaching the heights of self-realization, does not constitute an impasse in her current situation. Rather, the greatest source of Eveline's paralysis, of remaining in a locked and immobile state, is her own ambivalence. His nerves cause him to misremember upsetting events from his past or to reinterpret the most difficult and frustrating aspects of his present. She is comforted by "the familiar objects she never dreamed of being parted from" and explains that her life "was hard work - hard life - but now that she was about to leave it, she did not find her life totally undesirable. "The lingering memory of his mother's death, especially the woman's final absurd outburst from 'Derevaun Seraun!' Derevaun Seraun!", with the empty meaning of these words reflecting the cumulative empty meaning of her life, convinces Eveline of the urgent need behind her to escape. However, this looming maternal specter also keeps the girl trapped. Eveline's guilt in leaving home stems from the contract she made with her dying mother, a promise to preserve the home for as long as possible Even though her mother is no longer a physical entity in Eveline's world. , her faceless presence continues to exert a powerful influence. In a way, Eveline is as much a slave to the outdated and irrelevant expectations of her deceased mother as she is to the archaic social parameters established by her motherland, in the sense. figuratively, dead at the crucial moment of the action, where Eveline must follow through with her action. Her decision to escape the festering cesspool of a family life which will undoubtedly lead to the death of her soul, handicapping her. emotional and personal development, Eveline goes backwards. Frank, whom she previously considered her savior, is now represented as a figure of death and destruction: "All the seas of the world revolved around her heart. He drew her into them: he would drown her." Faced with the tumult of change, at the risk of listening to organic desire, Eveline denies her emerging sense of self and returns to the paralytic sphere. Although previously a source of fear and worry,Paralysis is also an anesthetic drug for Eveline, which is almost impossible for her to resist. Brought to the threshold between the old and the new, between life and death, Eveline resorts to familiar comfort and comfort. thought patterns, submitting her emerging and fragile identity to the authority of divine intervention: “she prayed to God to direct her, to show her what her duty was.” However, religion, particularly Catholicism, and belief in God are not infallible institutions. In Joyce, the Church is constructed as susceptible and guilty of perpetuating corruption, as evidenced by Father Flynn committing acts of simony and publicly losing his own faith in "The Sisters." Instead, more sacred than these failed, so-called "sacred" establishments is the sacredness of the inner person and one's own intuition/instinct. It is fitting, then, that it was only after this that Eveline appealed to God for guidance. she is overwhelmed and gripped by the visceral force of self-doubt: “Her distress awakened a nausea in her body and she continued to move her lips in silent and fervent prayer.” Blind adherence to religious “faith,” an unthinking and unequivocal belief in its ability to heal, teach, and save, is the product of cultural indoctrination rather than individual free will. They therefore contribute significantly to Eveline's figurative paralysis. At the end of the story, Eveline stands alone on the pier, watching Frank, her salvation, fade away like an unpleasant memory on the horizon: “his eyes gave her no sign of love or goodbye. or recognition." Ultimately, Eveline is powerless against the dehumanizing effects of paralysis. She does not mourn the loss of her one true love nor the missed opportunity that she will regret. On the contrary, and it is even more tragic, she mourns her own humanity By remaining trapped in her arduous, dutiful role at home, in her uninspired busyness, in a physical environment that is a veritable cesspool of filthy, emotionally angry water, Eveline has stunted her own human development. She will never manage to acquire the capacity to truly love, to feel, to connect to something outside herself. Having been complicit in the abortion of her emerging identity, Eveline allows herself to present herself as a host. void in which paralysis can infect her debilitating disease She is condemned to a life of waking death, a concept revisited and taken to stunning literary and emotional heights in Dubliners' longest and final episode, "The Dead." Arguably the most complex or complex of the fifteen stories that make up Dubliners, "The Dead" demonstrates the intense force with which paralysis dulls the senses, prevents individuals from achieving happiness, obscures understanding of fundamental human truths and , in essence, requires a form of spiritual and developmental death. However, what if the presence and influence of paralysis on the individual, the dangerous ease with which it unconsciously instills and engenders complacency within the psyche, were not so much reversed or cured, but recognized? What is the reverse side of paralysis, if not epiphany, the acquisition of knowledge and, therefore, the acquisition of personal freedom? In “The Dead,” the main character, Gabriel Conroy, is another Dubliner afflicted with the paralysis embodied by his city. , and evidenced by his relentless self-obsession and solipsism. The story places him at the home of his aunts, Kate and Julia Moran, as part of a lively Christmas dinner and celebration. Academic, both professor and part-time book reviewer, Gabriel is a man wholives and thinks within the limits of himself. He attempts to define himself and identifies himself in relation to others along superficial lines. During the night's festivities, Gabriel plans to deliver a grand and impressive speech and spends a lot of time mentally preparing for the occasion, sorting out the exact quotes and original lines he will use to showcase his intellectual prowess . Gabriel is aware of the disparity in sophistication and sheer "bookish" knowledge existing between him and the other guests: He was undecided about Robert Browning's lines because he feared they would be over his listeners' heads. A quote they might recognize from Shakespeare or The Melodies would be best. The indelicate clicking of the men's heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their level of culture differed from his. However, Gabriel's intense insecurity softens any implied conceit and lends itself to a characterization of a man eager to please rather than an elitist braggart. Early in the night, while speaking to the young maid Lily, Gabriel makes the rash mistake of conjecturing: "O... I suppose we will go to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh ?" when she informs him that she has finished school for the year. Offended by this casual suggestion, Lily retorts: "The men who are now are only palaver and what they can get from you", and abruptly, a sign of her anger, walks away. Gabriel harbors embarrassment over this incident, the dark tint of which colors his thoughts throughout the night, including his reluctance to express even the slightest trace of snobbery in his speech: he would only be making himself ridiculous by quoting them poetry they could not understand. They would think he was showing off his superior education. He would fail them just as he had failed the girl from the pantry. He had adopted a bad tone. His entire speech was a mistake, from start to finish, a total failure. Therefore, Gabriel is clearly a character defined by external elements, driven by his fear of judgment and disapproval, his identity being the product of the capricious perceptions of others, rather than the extension of any authentic, well-developed, self-guided notion of personality. In this sense, Gabriel is an undead figure, moving through life without truly knowing himself, detached from his surroundings, while ignoring this debilitating disconnect. He has been so conditioned, so socialized to the point of paralysis that the point where his more artificial, calculated and fragile "automatic" self ends and his authentic self begins has been completely erased. That is, until his wife hears a familiar, haunting melody and, through the visceral momentum and pure emotion of her memory, illustrates to him how a dead man, a shadow, can somehow another “being” more alive, having a more profound impact on another. that Gabriel never had in waking life. The night's festivities continued the next day, as signaled by "the piercing morning air," and the lingering guests finally prepared to return home. However, before he can leave, Gabriel must find his wife, Gretta, who has unexpectedly disappeared. Gabriel sees Gretta leaning at the top of the stairs, straining, Gabriel supposes, to listen to a distant sound. But Gabriel, in his physical and figurative paralysis, is incapable of hearing what his wife seems to be experiencing: "Gabriel was surprised by her immobility and strained his ears to listen too. But he only heard the sound of laughter and arguments on the steps of the porch, a few chords played on the piano and a few notes of a man's voice singing." Taking this curious pose,engaged in an activity steeped in mystery and silent intrigue, Gretta loses all her recognizable qualities and becomes an enigma to Gabriel. He abstracts her - in a gesture that betrays his inability to connect on a human level to what is unfamiliar to him - and reconciles the inner conflict caused by his uncertainty by seeing her as "a symbol of something". Even within this deeply organic experience, Gabriel is unable to express himself in emotional terms. He immediately withdraws into himself, as he usually does, and distances himself from the very personal moment by contextualizing it within the framework of art and the academic world: “If he were a painter, he would paint her in this attitude. His blue felt hat would show the bronze of his hair standing out against the darkness, and the dark panels of his skirt would set off the light panels he would call the painting if he were a painter. As a man, however, as a husband and lover, Gabriel does not know how to identify with this vision of his wife. Gabriel is right, however, as Gretta is symbolic in her dark red "terracotta" and "salmon pink" outfit, with the burst of color suddenly taking over her cheeks as she turns to Gabriel, with her "eyes that shone" of the vibrant light of life. Gretta is a figure of genuine experience, warmth, and active feeling, and conveys this attitude so powerfully that she ignites in Gabriel a kind of passion hitherto hidden from the reader. More importantly, this moment sows the seeds of epiphany in Gabriel, as he begins to recognize the festering abyss of routine, blandness, emotional frigidity, and dusty boredom into which their relationship has fallen: A vague still more tender joy escaped from his heart and ran in warm waves along his arteries. Like the tender fires of the stars, moments of their shared life, of which no one knew or would ever know, broke and illuminated his memory. He wanted to remember these moments, to make her forget the years of their sad existence together and to remember only their moments of ecstasy. The years, he felt, had not satisfied his soul or that of his son. Their children, his writings, his domestic worries had not extinguished the tender fire of all their souls. Gabriel is excited, stimulated and moved; however, this shift from a self-centered “mental” state to one of raw, fiery feelings does not read as hope or optimism. Rather, Gabriel's emotional outburst is stupid and pathetic, indicative of both his naivety and the irreversible effect that paralysis has had on his ability to "catch" others. He is not the source of Gretta's happiness or fulfillment. He is not responsible for the deluge of emotions with which she seems to have been overwhelmed. He is not, as he wishes, the “master of his strange mood”. In a revelation that evokes in Gabriel a bitter humiliation, "a shameful consciousness of his own person" at the height of his own excitement, Gretta admits that the thoughts currently assailing his soul are about "that song, The Lass of Aughrim" and the memory from the boy who once sang it, Michael Furey. Plunged back into his default disconnected mode, at a loss for words and understanding, and left as a little boy with only a series of questions, Gabriel asks, "And who was that person a long time ago? Someone you were in love with ?” Although she never answers this question directly, the sadness and longing that sadly flow from the words of her vague answers convince Gabriel that her assumptions are correct. Yes, it was a boy she loved and who died in the midst of their acquaintance. Gabriel asks: “And what did he die of, if..