Modernism (first
three decades of the XX Century) was a literary and cultural movement ; it was
cosmopolitan, formally complex and with a specific attention to aesthetic
values.

Modernism followed
and it was the response to the crisis of values of the end of the XIX Century.

The main problem
was God's absence and the crisis of the religious code of the time (‘' God is
dead'' Nietzsche). Besides humankind is not at the center of the universe, it
is not the son of God (Darwin) and it also can't govern it self ( Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche's Voluntary and later Freud's unconscious).

People felt lost
because till then, religion had offered life a moral and a meaning. Religious
Truth was gone and modernists searched another Truth, in different ways. The
individual became isolated but also very important because if space and time
(Einstein, Bergson and William James) were relative, the individual had to find
his own meaning.

If modernism is
sometimes defined obscure or complex that's because intellectuals like Virginia
Woolf and James Joyce wanted to express and experiment the communication of the
most intimate and perhaps semiconscious thoughts of their characters. In the
modern characters memories and expectations were bound and expressed with the
narrative technique of the stream of consciousness (Bergson) or the inner
monologue.

Modernists's search
of Truth was more focused on a character's mind than on what's outside of it.

In that period
psychology (Freud, Jung) and anthropology (Frazer, Lèvi-Strauss) were in
full bloom. Maybe because after the crisis of the christian code and of its
central ideas ( immortal soul and Providence), man's Ego was very fragile. The
idea of the immortal soul implies two aspects: the philosophical one ( the
immortal soul is a ‘'soubstance'', one of the twelve Aristotele's categories of
Being and for that immutable) and the religious one, wich gives individuality,
immateriality and immortality.   

Thus if the
immortal soul exists, the human ego is enclosed in a stable entity immune of
‘'becoming''.

Joyce's The
Dubliners is a collection of stories and also a collection of epiphanies.
The novels have a circular structure and the collection becomes a unitary
portrait of the Dubliners.

The reader can
notice that at the beginning of The Sisters the protagonist is looking
at a window and thinking about death and snow. At the end of The Dead
Gabriel is looking throught a window and thinking about death and snow, falling
over the souls of the living and the dead.

All the stories
have the same structure: the protagonist has an epiphany, he becomes conscious
of his condition and he has an intuition about how to change his condition.
Later he doesn't do anything, frustrated and paralyzed by his social
background. Throught the stories there is a red thread of themes:

paralysis, simony,
religion, death, love, useless morality, connection between living and dead.

Form has an
important role, such as style, that changes from a story to another depending
from the character

Joyce uses the
narrative technique of showing and the multiple perspective. His narrator
doesn't give a moral judgement and the reader has to find his own one.

Joyce uses the
symbolic realism, his characters are characterized by a backlog of realistic
details, that are on the other hand symbols and they give an additional
meaning.