Dubliners
James Joyce (1914)
“Fifteen stories. One city. Every character trapped. Joyce invented the modern short story by showing Dublin what it refused to see about itself.”
Character Analysis
A university lecturer and book reviewer who represents Dublin's educated, anglicized middle class. Gabriel is kind, well-meaning, and fundamentally insulated from genuine experience by his intelligence and his careful management of every social situation. His discovery that Gretta once loved Michael Furey — a boy who died at seventeen with more passion than Gabriel has ever felt — shatters his self-regard and opens him to the collection's final, transcendent vision. He is the paralyzed man who, in the last pages, begins to see beyond paralysis into something that includes both the living and the dead.
Educated, slightly pompous, literary in his allusions (he quotes Browning in his speech), careful to a fault — his language reveals a man who controls his world through vocabulary.