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The Dead By James Joyce

Decent Essays

Dubliners is a collection of short stories written by James Joyce detailing the lives of many seemingly average characters from Dublin during the early twentieth century. Throughout all of Dubliners, Joyce gives the protagonist of every story a sort of epiphany that leads them to realize the source of their unhappiness, oftentimes, the characters choose to do nothing about it. Farrington, the protagonist in the short story “Counterparts,” and Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist in “The Dead,” are two very different characters. Joyce uses this steep contrast between Farrington and Gabriel to argue about the circle of life and its routineness, and how happy endings are not common or to be expected no matter the circumstance.
Farrington is the …show more content…

Farrington is an aggressive alcoholic, so attached to drinking he gets upset when he spends all of his money on alcohol that he goes and buys more alcohol because he thinks he has to. He even goes so far as to pawn his watch so he would have enough money for more to drink. Throughout the story, he is seen drinking an excessive amount- during the day time- and is only seen consuming one thing, a caraway seed, which he used to mask his breath so that the people at his workplace would not know that he had been at the bar. He is constantly making his life worse for himself without even realizing it. His small acts of rebellion, such as going out to the bar with his friends, which is not so much a rebellion as it is his routine at this point, make him happier for a short amount of time until he realizes why he should not have done it in the first place, such as when he was angry with himself for spending money he did not have.
Referred to by others at his workplace as Farrington. The narrator refers to him as “the man” outside of work, but calls him “Farrington” when he is at the bar; which illustrates that he is only himself when he is at the bar. However, his work

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