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friend Mahoney, but this message is relayed along with confession of a sin we cannot understand, or even guess at: “And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little”. Hence, rather than the sort of closure a short story is supposed to provide, “An Encounter” opens up, vertiginously, on a host of other issues just when it should be shutting down new possibilities. The beautifully lyrical ending of “Araby“ has been much analyzed, and to read the criticism, one would think that there’s nothing at all out of the way about the narrator’s sudden outburst in his closing sentence: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” What—? Revelation, it seems, arrives from out of the blue (or black), but we readers can neither see it coming nor figure out with any certainty whither it will lead our protagonist.

These three stories—and many others in the collection besides, including “Eveline,” “Two Gallants,” “The Boarding House,” “Clay,” “A Painful Case,” “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” and “The Dead”—focus on the moment of sudden revelation that Joyce called, after the traditions of the Catholic Church, an “epiphany.” A full description of the epiphany is one of the elements that Joyce stripped out of Stephen Hero in making Portrait, if we turn back to that earlier text, however, we discover the following explanation of the place of the epiphany in Stephen Dedalus’s evolving aesthetic philosophy:

This triviality [of a banal conversation he has overheard] made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments (James Joyce, Stephen Hero, edited by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, second edition, New York: New Directions, 1963, p. 211).

This insistence on the importance of the trivial plays throughout both Dubliners and Portrait; and a great deal of scholarly attention has been paid over the years to the concept of the epiphany. Without rehearsing in detail that voluminous scholarship, we might pause here to note that the terse description given in Stephen Hero describes a locus for the epiphany (in “everyday life”) and an agent of the epiphany (the writer); if much of public life consists of playing some kind of role, wearing a mask, an epiphany is one of those rare moments when the mask slips, and we see past convention, past language, and glimpse some fundamental truth about human nature. But the question of for whom the timeless human truth of the situation is suddenly made manifest, apart from the writer who records it, is left somewhat ambiguous.

In the first three stories, our narrator is also the story’s protagonist; hence if the narrator experiences a “sudden spiritual manifestation,” we know that perforce our protagonist has, too. Things get much messier in the remaining twelve stories, though, in which characters are not left to tell their own tales; what confidence do we have that Mr. James Duffy in “A Painful Case,” for instance, has in fact come to terms with the revealed human bankruptcy of his life? The proper understanding of these epiphanies, and their proper role in an overall understanding of the Dubliners stories, is still a matter of some debate; it might help to suggest the richness of these stories, though, if we note only that truth can certainly be made manifest—to an author, his narrator, even his readers—without that truth ever quite penetrating the thick psychological defenses of his characters. One interesting index of this possible refusal of their epiphanies by various of the Dubliners characters is the image of the mirror: Think of Bob Doran, Mrs. Mooney, and her daughter Polly, as each comports him- or herself at the mirror in “The Boarding House”; think