The birth of James Joyce on February 2, 1882 was perfectly timed to introduce him to the literary world at the dawn of the twentieth century. Joyce would go on to dominate century by writing what is routinely voted its greatest novel, Ulysses. In addition to crafting a novel that defines the fragmentary, confused, complex and generally inexplicable state of society over the course of the 1900’s, Joyce’s status in literature is also assured as a result of his very active role in transforming the fundamental nature of the short story.
The short stories for which Joyce is most famous - “Araby,” “Eveline,” “The Dead,” and “The Sisters” - remain among the most often anthologized. In addition to his influence in individual stories, Joyce also muddied the waters in the determination of what constitutes the difference between a collection of short stories and a novel. The book which first brought him to attention, Dubliners, is a collection individual short fiction featuring self-contained stories which are nevertheless so intricately connected through a variety of shared elements as to constitute a revolutionary approach to the novel.
The revolutionary approach to writing short fiction which fundamentally altered the construction of the form is based upon Joyce’s conceptual innovation of the “epiphany.” Rather than relying on traditional story elements like plot or other conventional approaches to storytelling, Joyce’s stories attain a climax through the epiphany of a character. An epiphany is the sudden revelation of profound insight into human nature or the recognition of a powerful and life-altering truth which has remained stubbornly hidden until the moment of illumination. As a result, the short fiction of Joyce tell stories of the life of the mind of which it is perfectly acceptable to say “nothing happens” in relation to orthodox storytelling in which one action creates a consequence which organically leads to another action producing another consequence.
Despite the fact that “nothing happens” in Joyce’s short stories, what does take place within them has for more than a century been fodder for some of the longest and most intense critical studies and academic analysis on record. It is not unusual to find scholarly papers devoted to a single short story by James Joyce that runs as long as papers devoted to entire plays of Shakespeare.
