I came to read Dubliners because I came across a line that stayed with me: “He was born to be the one who stepped on the brakes for himself.” Something seemed to gently stir my heart, and I immediately went to find the original book.
After reading it, I found that this sentence could apply to almost every Dubliner. Joyce was only in his twenties when he wrote this book, but he had seen through the sickness: it was not that he didn’t want to move, but that every time he wanted to move, he held himself back. The whole book Dubliners is like a diary of someone who keeps stepping on the brakes, all the way to the end. From childhood, youth, adulthood to public life, fifteen stories all tell the same thing – how people watch themselves collapse and don’t even bother to struggle.
If you ask me which story moves me the most, I would choose “Eveline”. The young woman stood at the North Wall Wharf, holding the railing with one hand and the boat ticket in the other hand, ready to elope to Buenos Aires with her sailor’s boyfriend. She hesitated for a long time, recalling her mother’s misfortune, her father’s nasty words, and the trivial humiliation in the workplace.
Finally, the boat whistle sounded. She let go of the railing and did not look back. She stood obediently on the land of Dublin, like a tree planted there. What I read from that action was a sigh. Joyce didn’t laugh at her cowardice. He didn’t have the pleasure of being condescending.
He wrote the process of her letting go of the railing with an almost gentle touch, as if he understood that it was not that the woman didn’t want to leave, but that there was no way to escape in her mind. Her fear, habits, vague sense of responsibility for her family, and even the occasional soft-hearted nostalgia for her father, these things are like the wall skin of the old house, pasted layer by layer, wrapping her in place.
The sigh is much heavier than the reproach. Blame comes from thinking you stand higher; sighing comes from realizing you are standing in the same mud as her. The paralysis in Dubliners is never a dramatic struggle, but even the idea of struggle becomes blurred.
Look at the little boy in “Araby”, who imagined the market as a sacred temple of love. As a result, he only heard the metal sound of coins falling into the plate and saw two men counting money. He was angry and felt like a poor fool driven away by vanity, but he did nothing when he got home, not even slamming the door.
In “The Dead”, Gabriel found that his wife had her first love in her heart, and the teenager died in the rain for her. He stood in front of the window, and the snow fell on all the living and the dead. He accepted it and even felt that his mood was a little ridiculous. He saw through it, but he chose to continue to sleep.
This sense of conspiracy is the most painful: they obviously see the absurdity of life, but they go along with the performance, like a silent conspiracy. Everyone pretends that they are not paralyzed, so no one really has to move. Joyce didn’t offer a solution, and he didn’t even bother to write a clear criticism.
He just spread those scenes in front of you, like the gray light in the winter afternoon, not dazzling, but you can’t get rid of them. After closing the book, I repeatedly recalled the string of images: her hand letting go of the railing, the dim light of the market, and the snow falling on the full-body mirror.
They didn’t tell me any big truth, but they reminded me of the countless brakes I had stepped on – the details that I didn’t dare to ask at work, the words that were swallowed back in the relationship, and the plans I gave up on at three o’clock in the morning. The great thing about Joyce is that he wrote this personal shame as a public experience. When you read it, you won’t feel that he is scolding you. You will only feel that he has caught something for you that you have been pretending not to see.
I put that sentence at the beginning: He was born to be the one who stepped on the brakes for himself. It has become the spell of the whole book, and it has also become an angle for me to look at myself again. Later, I thought, would Eveline be happy if she got on the boat? Probably not. She may still hesitate, be afraid and regretful around the sailor.
But Joyce doesn’t write about happiness or unhappiness. What he writes about is that you don’t even try. The possibility of giving up completely, the habit of taking the initiative to let go in the face of opportunities, is more suffocating than any failure. So I can’t praise this book in flowery language.
It’s not easy to read. It makes you uncomfortable. It’s like a mirror. The person in the mirror is not a Dubliner, but me.
