Character Movement in Dubliners In a letter to his publisher, Grant Richards, regarding his collection of stories entitled Dubliners, James Joyce wrote: My intention was to write a chapter in the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because this city seemed to me the center of paralysis. I tried to present it to the indifferent public in four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are listed in this order. I wrote it mainly in a style of scrupulous malice and with the conviction that he is a very daring man who dares to modify in resentment, even more to distort, everything he has seen and heard ( Peake 2). his passion for Dublin is evident in the many details he uses among Dubliners. No street name, tower, pub or church is left undetermined. Joyce often boasted to his brother Stanislaus that if Dublin disappeared from the face of the earth, it would not be difficult to rebuild it, simply on the basis of Joyce's work (Walzl 169). Although all but three of the Dubliners stories were written while Joyce was in self-imposed exile from Ireland, he describes the walks his characters took through Dublin, carefully noting every twist and turn of every street corner. The movements noted by Joyce are not arbitrary, but symbolic. Joyce wanted his audience to pay close attention to the direction of the characters' movements. In most stories, the Orient symbolizes voluntary exile and flight. Westward movements indicate acceptance of corruption and eternal paralysis. In Dubliners, Joyce uses symbolic physical movement to trace the different stages of paralysis of his characters. In the three childhood tales, "Sist...... middle of paper ...... elements of his book" (60). The movements of Joyce's characters in his work Dubliners provide a revealing picture of the direction Joyce predicted for the city of Dublin. Works Cited Bidwell, Bruce and Linda Heffer. The Joycean Way: A topographical guide to Dubliners and a portrait of the artist as a young man. Johns Hopkins: Baltimore, 1981. Gifford, Don. Annotated Joyce: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. University of California: Berkeley, 1982. Joyce, James. Dubliners. Penguin Books: New York, 1975. Peake, C. H. James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist. Stanford University: Stanford, 1977. Tindall, William York. A Reader's Guide to James Joyce. Noonday Press: New York, 1959. Walzl, Florence L. “Dubliners.” A further study of James Joyce. Ed. Zack Bowen and James F. Carens. Greenwood Press: London, 1984.