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

Jay Gatsby (James Gatz)

Gatsby is, of course, both the novel's title character and its protagonist. Gatsby is a mysterious, fantastically wealthy young man. Every Saturday, his garish Gothic mansion in West Egg serves as the site of extravagant parties. Later in the novel, we learn that his real name is James Gatz; he was born in North Dakota to an impoverished farming family. While serving in the Army in World War I, Gatsby met Daisy Fay (now Daisy Buchanan) and fell passionately in love with her. He worked briefly for a millionaire, and became acquainted with the people and customs of high society. This, coupled with his love of Daisy, inspired Gatsby to devote his life to the acquisition of wealth.

The Great Gatsby

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Stability vs. Freedom

The psychological struggle between the need for stability and the desire for freedom is perhaps the central concern of Breakfast at Tiffany's. The conflict structures the relationship between the narrator and Holly, who are opposing forces. While the narrator is happy to have his first home, Holly is consumed by her need to constantly escape from places, people and things. Even Holly's identity is in a constant state of flux. Holly assumes the name "Holiday Golightly", which encapsulates her strategy of avoiding stability by making a holiday out of life, and abandoning relationships and responsibilities when they threaten to jeopardize her freedom. For Holly, the distinction between stability and freedom is articulated by two of the novella's major symbols: animals (including Holly's cat) and Tiffany's (in which Holly feels properly "at home"). Holly despises the caging of animals, and refuses to name her cat. As a "wild thing", she feels he doesn't "belong" to her. Her fantasy that one day she will have, "breakfast at Tiffany's," an absurdity since Tiffany's does not serve food, indicates her choice to avoid stability by casting it in the unattainable ideals of fantasy.

By casting the two main characters on opposite sides of the stability/freedom divide, Capote suggests that each has something to learn from the other. The mutual influence of the two friends is demonstrated by their Christmas gift exchange, in which Holly gives the narrator a bird cage and the narrator gives her a medal of St. Christopher. Each gift illustrates a median between stability and freedom: Holly's gift is a cage, but it will never imprison a bird, and the narrator's gift is a medal of the patron saint of travel, but it comes from Tiffany's, Holly's personal symbol of home. By the conclusion of Breakfast at Tiffany's, it is clear that this influence has, at least in part, been realized: Holly confesses her sense of "belonging" with her cat, and the narrator reveals that, since the conclusion of their friendship, he has enjoyed lengthy trips around the world.

While Holly and the narrator represent different psychological impulses toward stability and freedom, Breakfast at Tiffany's suggests that both characters' pathologies stem from the sense of social exclusion common to people whose lifestyles do not conform to American convention. Indeed, both characters are consumed with a sense that they do not belong or are not "at home" in the larger world. The narrator feels a constant outsider, his nose pressed against a glass, and Holly is convinced that she is a "wild thing", unsuited to a proper place in society. Thus, Holly and the narrator are similar insofar as for both of them, "home" has become a charged object of fantasy and longing.

Breakfast at Tiffany's
Truman Capote

Sonnet XXII

My glass shall not persuade me I am old,
So long as youth and thou are of one date;
But when in thee time's furrows I behold,
Then look I death my days should expiate.

For all that beauty that doth cover thee,
Is but the seemly raiment of my heart,
Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me:
How can I then be elder than thou art?

O! therefore love, be of thyself so wary
As I, not for myself, but for thee will;
Bearing thy heart, which I will keep so chary
As tender nurse her babe from faring ill.

Presume not on thy heart when mine is slain,
Thou gav'st me thine not to give back again.

I would I were a careless child,
Still dwelling in my Highland cave,
Or roaming through the dusky wild,
Or bounding o'er the dark blue wave;
The cumbrous pomp of Saxon pride
Accords not with the freeborn soul,
Which loves the mountain's craggy side,
And seeks the rocks where billows roll.

Fortune! take back these cultured lands,
Take back this name of splendid sound!
I hate the touch of servile hands,
I hate the slaves that cringe around.
Place me among the rocks I love,
Which sound to Ocean's wildest roar;
I ask but this - again to rove
Through scenes my youth hath known before.
Few are my years, and yet I feel
The world was ne'er designed for me:
Ah! why do dark'ning shades conceal
The hour when man must cease to be?
Once I beheld a splendid dream,
A visionary scene of bliss:
Truth! - wherefore did thy hated beam
Awake me to a world like this?

I loves - but those I love are gone;
Had friends - my early friends are fled:
How cheerless feels the heart alone,
When all its former hopes are dead!
Though gay companions o'er the bowl
Dispel awhile the sense of ill'
Though pleasure stirs the maddening soul,
The heart - the heart - is lonely still.

How dull! to hear the voice of those
Whom rank or chance, whom wealth or power,
Have made, though neither friends nor foes,
Associates of the festive hour.
Give me again a faithful few,
In years and feelings still the same,
And I will fly the midnight crew,
Where boist'rous joy is but a name.

And woman, lovely woman! thou,
My hope, my comforter, my all!
How cold must be my bosom now,
When e'en thy smiles begin to pall!
Without a sigh would I resign
This busy scene of splendid woe,
To make that calm contentment mine,
Which virtue know, or seems to know.

Fain would I fly the haunts of men -
I seek to shun, not hate mankind;
My breast requires the sullen glen,
Whose gloom may suit a darken'd mind.
Oh! that to me the wings were given
Which bear the turtle to her nest!
Then would I cleave the vault of heaven,
To flee away, and be at rest.