Search for meaning in James Joyce's DublinersIn all of James Joyce's Dubliners James Joyce deliberately erases the traditional markers of the short story: causality, closure, etc. In doing so, "the novel continually offers texts that mark their own complexity by highlighting what traditional realism seeks to hide: the artifice and inadequacy inherent in a writer's attempt to represent reality. (Seidel 31)" By refusing to adopt a reductive approach to the world(s) he presents on the page - to offer a "meaning" or an "end" - Joyce draws the reader into epistemological and ontological realms complex and disturbing. The meaning is no longer unitary and prescriptive, the author will not reveal (read impose) what the story "means" at the end and therefore we definitely cannot "know" anything about it. On the contrary, meaning, like modernism, generates its own multiplicity in Joyce's works, diffuses into something necessarily plural: meanings. An ontological crisis is inextricable from this crisis of meaning and representation. of Joyce, the reader is removed from his traditionally passive role as receiver of the knowledge an author seeks to transmit, and "positions himself as both reader and writer of text, in some way playing an equally important role in the construction of the work that the reader". (Benstock 17) “In the novel's opening story, 'The Sisters,' Joyce elevates this concern with writing "reality" from subtheme to theme: the story is an extended meditation on textuality as much that it is the story of a boy and a priest. By beginning with a metatext, Joyce brilliantly opens the entire collection to a different type of reading, based on observing rather than ignoring the limits of literature. With...... middle of paper...... seems not only "difficult", as in difficult or complex, but viscerally painful to try to grasp a meaning or truth about reality through words on a paper. page.Works cited: Benstock, Bernard. Critical Essays on James Joyce. GK Hall & Co. Boston, Massachusetts: 1985. Joyce, James. Dubliners. Washington Square Press. New York, New York: 1998. Seidel, Michael. James Joyce: A Brief Introduction. Blackwell Publishers, Inc. Oxford, United Kingdom: 2002. Works consulted: Fairhall, James. James Joyce and the question of history. Cambridge University Press. New York, New York: 1993. Garrett, Peter K., ed. Interpretations of 20th-century Dubliners. Prentice-Hall, Inc. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: 1968. Torchiana, Donald T. Backgrounds for Joyce's Dubliners. Allen & Unwin, Inc. Winchester, Massachusetts: 1986.