Two gallants

On a Sunday evening in August, a young man named Corley has told another, Lenehan, of a plan he has hatched with a housekeeper engaged in prostitution on the side. Corley goes off with the young woman, while Lenehan walks idly around Dublin until 10:30, stopping only to eat a dinner of peas and ginger beer at a pub. Finally, exactly according to plan, Lenehan observes from a distance but does not interrupt as the woman enters via the basement the elegant house where she works and emerges from the front door. Minutes later, Corley shows Lenehan what she has stolen from inside: a gold coin.

Dubliners

After the race

After an automobile race outside Dublin, a 26-year-old Irishman named Jimmy, the son of a wealthy former butcher, accompanies the French team back into the city. Jimmy was educated at a Catholic preparatory school in England, then Trinity College in Dublin, and finally at Cambridge University (though he was never a serious student). Back in Dublin, Jimmy and one of the drivers (Villona) change their clothes at his parents’ house, and then join the others (Ségouin and Rivière) as well as a young Englishman (Routh) for dinner at the hotel of a team member. Afterward, accompanied by an American (Farley), Jimmy, the French racing team, and the Englishman take a train to nearby Kingstown. There they board the American’s yacht. Aboard the yacht they dance, eat, drink, and play cards, at which Jimmy loses a great deal of money.

Dubliners

Eveline

Eveline Hill, a 19-year-old woman who works in a Dublin shop, sits inside her family’s house recalling childhood, including some happy memories as well as her father’s drunken brutality to her and her siblings. Eveline thinks about people she has known who have either left Ireland (a priest who has traveled to Melbourne, for example) or died (her mother and her brother Ernest), and of her own plans to leave the country with a man named Frank. She recalls meeting Frank, an Irish sailor now living in Argentina, and dating him while he visited Dublin on vacation. Eveline also thinks about her father’s disapproval of Frank, and of her promise “to keep the home together as long as she could” before her mother grew deranged and died. Later, gripped by fear of the unknown and probably guilt as well, Eveline finds herself unable to board the ferry to England, where she and Frank are scheduled to meet a ship bound for South America. He leaves without her.

Dubliners

Araby

young boy who is similar in age and temperament to those in “The Sisters” and “An Encounter” develops a crush on Mangan’s sister, a girl who lives across the street. One evening she asks him if he plans to go to a bazaar (a fair organized, probably by a church, to raise money for charity) called Araby. The girl will be away on a retreat when the bazaar is held and therefore unable to attend. The boy promises that if he goes he will bring her something from Araby.

The boy requests and receives permission to attend the bazaar on Saturday night. When Saturday night comes, however, his uncle returns home late, possibly having visited a pub after work. After much anguished waiting, the boy receives money for the bazaar, but by the time he arrives at Araby, it is too late. The event is shutting down for the night, and he does not have enough money to buy something nice for Mangan’s sister anyway. The boy cries in frustration.

Dubliners

An encounter

As in “The Sisters,” an unnamed storyteller (possibly the same narrator featured in that story) recalls a transformative boyhood experience. Here, the boy schemes with his friends Leo Dillon and Mahony to play hooky from their exclusive private school one day in June and walk across Dublin, and then ride a ferry boat across the River Liffey to the Pigeon House. When Dillon fails to show up, the narrator and Mahony leave without him.

After crossing the Liffey, the boys chase a stray cat across a field and encounter a stranger there. The man quizzes the narrator and Mahony on the books they’ve read, and then asks them if they have girlfriends. After a while, the man crosses the field and does something that the boys find “queer”—probably masturbating. Then he returns. When Mahony leaves to pursue the cat further, the strange man talks obsessively to the protagonist (main character) about the need for boys who misbehave to be whipped. When the stranger is done talking, the boy leaves, seeking Mahony.

Dubliners

The sisters

It is 1895 in Dublin, Ireland when an unnamed boy comes down to supper one evening. Family friend Old Cotter is telling the boy’s aunt and uncle that the boy’s mentor, Father James Flynn, has passed away after a third stroke. The two men share the opinion that spending time with Father Flynn was unhealthy for the boy, who should have been playing “with young lads of his own age.” In bed later, the boy tries to understand why Old Cotter and his uncle would not want him to associate with Father Flynn; then he imagines or dreams about the priest trying to confess something to him.

The following morning, the boy visits Father Flynn’s house and finds a card displayed outside announcing the man’s death, but he does not knock on the door. He feels less sad than he would have expected; in fact, the boy experiences “a sensation of freedom” as a result of his mentor’s death. That evening, the boy’s aunt takes him on a formal visit to the house of mourning. He sees the body of Father Flynn lying in an open casket, after which the boy’s aunt and the priest’s two sisters converse cryptically about the deceased, implying that he was mentally unstable for some time before dying and that he may have been involved in some scandal or other.

Dubliners

James Joyce

Excess and Destruction

One overriding moral message in the novel is that living recklessly and excessively leads to personal decline and destruction. The consequences extend beyond the individual and affect others, as well, such as when Abe's excessive drinking causes the imprisonment of one innocent man and the death of another. Dick's excessive drinking also has dire consequences, such as alienating his friends, ruining his career, and getting him beaten and imprisoned. His obsessive interest in youth and beauty contributes to the destruction of his marriage, paints him as a sexual pervert, and eventually entangles him in a lawsuit.

Fitzgerald wrote this novel during an era that clearly indicated how living excessively and recklessly has serious and destructive consequences. The Jazz Age was, in essence, a period of excess. Following World War I, the social climate reached an energetic peak during the Roaring Twenties. With a new emphasis on individualism and the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment, this period was filled with raucous gaiety that, in the end, had serious negative consequences. The excesses of drink and pleasure that cause the destruction of characters in Tender is the Night reflect Fitzgerald's sensitivity to the excesses of the Jazz Age prior to the Great Depression.

Tender is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald