Like a great play, Dubliners exists as written, and yet also awaits performance. We read the stories, determined to ferret out what they mean, only to end up wondering about ourselves. Paradoxically, the protean quality of these stories - the way they seem to have something to say about everything - makes them appear, to the first time reader, to be about nothing at all. They begin in the middle of something and stop unexpectedly with what may or may not be a new beginning. Or to describe this a different way, the stories read as if someone has made a two-hour film by putting the camera on a tripod and letting it run, and then brought the result directly to the screen, with no editing. Upon first reading, there seem to be no obvious clues to the strategy behind Joyce's selection of a bewildering array of obscure street names, stray thoughts, lost corkscrews, gold coins, lost plumcakes, confiscated adventure books, and forgotten novels of a dead priest. Never before, it seems, has a writer used so much detail to explain so little.

At the same time, there is an undeniable drive in the stories, an urgency many readers feel, but cannot account for: what does Father Flynn wish to confess in ‘The Sisters’? What has happened to make Lily behave so strangely in ‘The Dead’? The stories appear to be taking the reader toward a moral dilemma, or a climax, or a revelation, or at least a conclusion, and then they stop, but without appearing to have ended. I can sympathize with this frustration. When I first read ‘The Sisters’, I was not troubled by its abrupt ending because I thought there was something wrong with my edition, and that the ‘end’ of the story had somehow failed to be printed in my text: ‘So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him....’ (D 10). And then the story is over! It not only ends in the middle of something, it doesn’t even conclude with a full sentence. I was also puzzled that a writer I had been told was a master of the English language had to use the word ‘that’ three times in this strangely uncommunicative sentence.