From James Joyces Stephen Hero to After The Race - Blending Narrator

From James Joyces Stephen Hero to After The Race - Blending Narrator and Character James Joyces break up of a novel, Stephen Hero, leaves the reader little room to interpret the text for themselves. The work lacks the narrative distance that Joyce achieves in his later works. Dubliners, a work Joyce was writing concurrently, apparently employs a drastically different percentage. A voice which leaves the reader room to make judgments of their own. Yet it is curious that Joyce could produce these two works at the equal time, one that controls the reader so directly, telling not showing , while the other, Dubliners, seems to give the reader the power of final interpretation over the characters it portrays. By changing voice from a narrator who tells the reader to a narrator who shows the reader in Dubliners, Joyce has seemingly relinquished considerable control over his vision of Dublin. However, Joyces swop of narrator yields him alternative forms of authorial sovereignty. In fac t, Joyce guides the reader in a very much much powerful way in Dubliners without the readers knowledge. Through quick shifts in point of view and interjections that seem to be the voice of a character, yet are not directly linked to it, Joyce controls the stories in Dubliners more subtly and with more effect than the bold declarations in Stephen Hero ever do. In her essay Oh Shes A Nice Lady A Rereading of A Mother Jane E. Miller addresses the liberate of judgment in the story. Although told in an aloof and anonymous third-person, the narrativeis always shifting, almost imperceptibly, from an objective stance to less neutral observations which, because of their perspective or particular option of words, appear to be those of Mrs. Kearney. (Miller,... ...f him in the narration. These interjections in After the Race are not the complete rupture of objectivity that they are in Stephen Hero. Still, the effect is much the selfsame(prenominal). They channel the reader rather than te ll the reader how to judge. They offer the reader a guide to the reading of After the Race in much the same way a legend acts for a map. This is not to say that phrases like this operate in every story of Dubliners as they do here. But in the story After the Race they give the reader important directions for reading much like the narrative language does in A Mother. In addition, these phrases seem to be a much more polished version of the blunt preaching Joyce does in Stephen Hero. They operate on the reader subtly, blending the voice of character and narrator to produce a guide to the reading, not a usurpation of, as in Stephen Hero, the text.