Dubliners - ‘Nothing is unnecessary, and nothing is spelled out; we are expected to supply the missing pieces ourselves.’
Matt West
Deps
Dubliners
‘Nothing is unnecessary, and nothing is spelled out; we are expected to supply the missing pieces ourselves.’
This refers to the style of the short stories in Dubliners. Each of the fifteen stories are written in this way. The first few stories refer to the specific theme of childhood, and they are all narrated by children. The fact that ‘nothing is unnecessary’ means that all of the information in the story is relevant. In the short stories the entire plot is not laid out on a plate. There are certain things that you have to work out for yourself. In the first story ‘The Sisters’ there is a hint that the priest is a distorted figure. ‘I wouldn’t like children of mine to have too much to say to a man like that’. Here Old Cotter a friend of the boy’s uncle gives his opinion of the priest. In this it has overtones of a warning as if the priest is a paedophile. Here the reader is expected to ‘supply the missing pieces.’ In the short story not everything is instantly apparent. They require the reader to interpret for themselves what is going on. In the first story a priest dies instead of focusing on the detail of how he died Joyce only talks of the priests ‘third stroke.’ The short stories don’t have an ending as such that corresponds with the rest of the story, this also leaves the reader in suspense ‘So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him…’ This is the ending of the first story. It doesn’t even end in a full stop it has an unfinished sentence signifying the end of the story. It puts the reader on an edge as they have reached the end of the story without realising it.
