Would someone explain the appeal of Dubliners to me? It just

Are you a woman?

>>9722237
I wish

Save for "Araby" and "The Dead" the rest of the book did nothing for me.

>>9722234

If you didn't like it, you didn't like it. I wouldn't view the stories as if they lacked "meaning" but instead take them as brief snippets that intentionally induce anxiety and lack resolution. Everyone talks about the Dead, but the sense of unease you get from the story about the two boys encountering the old pervert or the drunken fuck-up who takes his impotent rage out on his kid is intense and part of why I enjoyed reading these stories so much.

>>9722234
It makes a lot more sense if you're Irish and I honestly don't think foreigners get as much out it due to the colloquialisms

>It just seems like very plain stories, with very plain writing.
If you struggle to understand what Joyce is trying to convey, just look up interpretations etc. There's no shame in that.

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/dubliners/

>>9722269
Also if you *need* a meaning a pretty common take iirc is that the stories are indicative of the stagnation and paralysis that modern life induces in people.

You may just be too used to bombast in literature. The works are beautiful, because of their wonderfully lucid and restrained prose style, their well-done psychological characterizations, and the sense of melancholy that permeates the whole book. As someone else mentioned >>9722295 the main theme of the book is paralysis. It starts out with out with Father Flynn's death and his paralysis before hand (the narrator literally says in the first paragraph "Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis."), the theme of paralysis is repeated throughout the story, and it once again ends with a paralyzed character and reflection on death. Half the beauty of the book is how delicately Joyce ties all the disparate stories together with these repeating motifs.

>>9722234
>like very plain stories, with very plain writing
>it's almost as if the stories have no meaning.

It's not plain. The emotions behind the stories are very resonant, but it's sometimes not all that obvious. I have to assume that you're new to reading literature not because "lol pleb opinion," but because you're just objectively wrong about this.

Protip: You will need to read closely and think about smaller things like word choice, or details in the descriptions. You will need to think about symbolism and historical context. And you will need to finish the damn book because The Dead's meaning is really obvious and I again have to go for assumptions and conclude you didn't get to that story.

/lit/ has a bad habit of doing 0 thinking or research about what they read and treating their initial emotional reaction as the crowning analysis. Please don't fall for this anymore and lower the quality of our usually intelligent and thoughtful board.

>>9722260
Same actually I never even finished the dead

>>9722234
I also didn't really get the "deep meanings" when I read it but I don't know why, I couldn`t put the book down and read it in 2 days. Still don't really know what to think of it..

"The Dead" is objectively the best but I think I liked "A little cloud" more something about it was just so relateable

>>9722284
This desu, the slow arc from childhood to adulthood represent the maturation of the Irish state, from throwing stones at the proddies to betting more than you can afford in an effort to impress the Europeans. Even on a more literal level from growing up in Ireland it's uncanny how close to my own childhood it is for a 100+ year old book.