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of Mr. Duffy, as he is confronted with the image of himself in the laborious, droning train “winding out of Kingsbridge Station”; think, perhaps, of Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead,” eschewing light and avoiding mirrors in the Gresham Hotel as his story builds to its tragic climax. Joyce borrowed his term for these dramatically revealing moments from the apparition of the Christ child to the Magi, from the account in the Gospel of Matthew; part of what Joyce so disturbingly suggests, time and again in Dubliners, is that contemporary magi would sooner deny the reality of what they had seen, would, like Mr. Duffy, sooner “doubt the reality of what memory” tells them, than come to terms with the difficult changes their revelations would seem to demand of them.

This skepticism about human beings’ willingness, or ability, to change is of a piece with Joyce’s stylistic regimen, what he called “a style of scrupulous meanness”: a style, in other words, that places an absolute moral value on truth-telling. Given the aesthetic detachment from ethical and political concerns evidenced by much twentieth-century literature, Joyce’s early remarks about Dubliners sound almost naive: He writes to Grant Richards, for instance, that “my intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country” (Letters, vol. 2, p. 134), and later that “I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way that I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country” (Letters, vol. 1, pp. 62-63). A month later, Joyce further opines that should Richards decide not to publish the book, “I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass” (Letters, vol. 1, p. 64). Surely comments like these, even as they confirm some of the worst stereotypes of artistic egotism, stand as a healthy corrective to the common depiction of the modernist writers as disaffected aesthetes, unconcerned about the moral or political dimension of their work.

Concerned as he is with the moral paralysis of the people of Dublin—a diagnosis which, Joyce knew well enough, applied equally to the denizens of any modern city—the stories of Dubliners at the same time explore the special responsibilities of the man of letters in general, and the artist in particular. The volume’s last and greatest story, “The Dead,” stands as a case in point; in it, Joyce explores the death-in-life of a handful of Dubliners, but most poignantly, perhaps, that of the story’s protagonist, Gabriel Conroy: a figure of what Joyce feared he might have become, had he not left Dublin permanently for the continent in 1904. Gabriel is intelligent, well-educated, a man of the world; he vacations in Belgium, not the west of Ireland, teaches and reviews books, makes learned allusions to Greek mythology and the poetry of Robert Browning in his after-dinner remarks—he even wears galoshes! Yet he is, for all that, another paralytic soul: His nose is put out of joint three different times before dinner is even served, as minor resistance from other guests at his aunts’ party (Lily, his wife Gretta, and Molly Ivors) put in peril his oversize yet fragile male ego. He proceeds to use his speech to take revenge on a college friend no longer at the party, and parades his own learning at the expense of his aunts’ pleasure; and in the climactic scene at the Gresham Hotel, which includes one of the best known and most beautiful passages in all of modern literature, Gabriel’s petulant anger (fueled by a frustrated “pang of lust”) ruins an opportunity to know his wife yet more intimately and honestly than hitherto he ever has.

In Dubliners, a handful of writers and would-be writers make up a supporting cast: The protagonist-narrators in the first three stories clearly have literary pretensions, as do Little Chandler (“A Little Cloud”), Mr. Duffy (“A Painful Case”), Joe Hynes (“Ivy Day in the Committee Room”), and Gabriel Conroy. In A Portrait