Every night, as I looked at the window, I repeated the word paralysis to myself under my breath. It had always sounded strange to my ears, like the word gnomon in Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it seemed to me to be the name of an evil and sinful being. He filled me with fear, yet I longed to be closer to him and watch his deadly work. - boy narrator, The Sisters Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Paralysis. For characters in James Joyce's works, it is a literal force that prevents them from moving physically, from developing and maturing, from forming or honoring a truly realized sense of self. Although expressed through a child's immature vocabulary, naivety, and limited life experience, the above quote is profound for the seemingly contradictory and surprising feeling it suggests. Are Joyce's characters helpless about their own lives, strangely drawn to the forces of paralysis that hold them captive? Do they simply choose to walk away from the risk, from the leap of faith that requires profound change? Or, as citizens of Dublin, of that “dear dirty” city, are they victims of a fate inflicted upon them by their frozen metropolis, a proverbial dead-end street paved with the filth of immorality and invaded by the fragments of broken dreams? These characters repeatedly return to their immobile, bereft state, mourning the loss of a missed opportunity or unrealized potential. Therefore, not only is paralysis in Joyce a force that prevents, dissuades, hinders and frustrates. It has a more insidious effect, that of anesthesia, and a more pernicious allure, that of the comfort that accompanies complete abandonment. In Dubliners, illustrated by stories like "Eveline" and "The Dead," and their examples of both literal and figurative paralysis, Joyce proposes that to be truly paralyzed, one must be more than simply "stuck" or immobile. The most devastating form of debilitation occurs when you are unaware of your frozen state. The individual is so ensconced within the pattern of paralysis that he cannot see beyond its iron boundaries, cannot recognize the need or demand for change. His ignorance and fearful ambivalence are the double-sided bullet that pierces the heart of personal growth, self-realization and emotional fulfillment. In one of the episodes in the central "Teenagers" section of Dubliners, "Eveline" tells the story of a nineteen-year-old shop assistant at a crossroads. She is a thoughtful girl, overwhelmed by memories of childhood and the loss of people close to her, by the definitiveness of death and the inevitability of change. The concept of "home" is very dear to Eveline, even as its fabric of stability begins to crumble. He has a strong attachment to his physical environment, to his city Dublin, to his house on the boulevard, as well as to the comforting memories of the children who "played together in that field: the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple. " This was a simpler time for Eveline, when her mother was still alive and her father had not yet been driven, bruised and battered by life's harsh blows to his current incarnation as a drunken, irritating man. However, as Eveline laments, things change and her current state is one of unhappiness and disappointment. She took on the role of matriarch within her family after her mother's death. The pressures of supporting her family, of tending to the demanding needs of younger children - and the confluence of these responsibilities occurring under her father's watchful and critical eye - bring Eveline to her breaking point.break. As a result, she is now preparing to "leave like the others, to leave her home" and forge a new life with her lover, Frank. However, Eveline is hindered, her genuine desires and desires are attenuated.by her inner paralysis. She is afraid, uncertain, in making this transition from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from girl to woman, from a life of suffocating obligation to one of liberating, self-guided activity. Eveline at times expresses a visceral ecstasy, invigorated by the prospect of becoming Frank's wife and moving with him to Buenos Aires, a city whose very name ("good air") symbolizes freshness, novelty and rebirth. The city stands in stark contrast to Eveline's decadent domestic life in Dublin, characterized by textual descriptions of her inhaling "the smell of dusty cretonne" and noticing the "yellowing" of old childhood photographs. Eveline is not simply dissatisfied and uninspired, but panic-stricken at the idea of ​​following in her dead mother's footsteps, destined to repeat or enact her pitiful life "of banal sacrifices ending in final madness." Eveline's interior monologue reveals the desperation of her terror: escape. He has to run! Frank would have saved her. He would give her life, maybe even love. But she wanted to live. Why should he be unhappy? He had the right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, hold her in his arms. He would save her. However, what prevents Eveline from reaching total happiness, from reaching the heights of self-realization, are not the dead-end traps of her current situation. Rather, the main source of Eveline's paralysis, of remaining in a stuck and immobile state, is her own ambivalence. Her nerves lead her to misremember upsetting events from her past or to reinterpret the most difficult and frustrating aspects of her present. She is comforted "by the familiar objects she had never dreamed of parting with" and rationalizes that her life "has been hard work – a hard life – but now that she was about to leave it, she didn't find it entirely an undesirable life." The lingering memory of her mother's death, especially the woman's last senseless outburst of "Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!", with the empty meaning of those words mirroring the cumulatively empty meaning of her life, convinces Eveline of the urgency behind his need to escape. However, this looming maternal specter also keeps the girl trapped. Eveline's guilt for leaving home stems from the contract she made with her dying mother, the promise to preserve the family for as long as possible. Even though her mother is no longer a physical entity in Eveline's world, her faceless presence continues to exert a powerful influence. In a sense, Eveline is as much a slave to her dead mother's outdated and irrelevant expectations as she is to the archaic social parameters established by her figuratively dead homeland. At the crucial moment of the action, when Eveline must follow through on her decision to escape the rotten sewer of a domestic life that will surely lead to the death of her soul, hindering her emotional and personal development, Eveline pulls back. Frank, whom she had previously regarded as her savior, is now himself depicted as a figure of death and destruction: "All the seas of the world were rolling around his heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her." Faced with the turmoil of change, the risk of heeding organic desire, Eveline denies her nascent sense of self and returns to the paralytic sphere. Although once a source of fear and worry, paralysis for Eveline is also a numbing drug, the nullifying effect of which she finds almost impossible to resist.Brought to the threshold between old and new, between life and death, Eveline resorts to familiar comforts and patterns of thought, subsuming her nascent, fragile identity to the authority of divine intervention: "she prayed to God to direct her, to show her what she was his duty." However, religion, especially Catholicism, and belief in God are not infallible institutions. In Joyce, the Church is constructed as susceptible to and guilty of perpetuating corruption, as evidenced by Father Flynn committing acts of simony and publicly losing his faith in the "Sisters". Instead, more sacred than these bankrupt, supposedly “sanctified” institutions are the sanctity of the inner person and their intuition/instinct. How fitting, then, that only after Eveline appealed to God for guidance was she overcome and gripped by the visceral force of insecurity: "Her anguish awakened a nausea in her body and she continued to move her lips in silent fervent prayer ". A blind adherence to religious “faith,” a reckless and unequivocal belief in its ability to heal, educate, and save, are products of cultural indoctrination rather than free will. Thus, they contribute significantly to Eveline's figurative paralysis. At the end of the story, Eveline remains alone on the dock, watching Frank, her salvation, fade away like an unpleasant memory on the horizon: "her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell." or recognition." Ultimately, Eveline is helpless in the face of the dehumanizing effects of paralysis. She does not mourn the loss of her one true love and the missed opportunity she will live to regret. Rather, and even more tragically, she grieves for her own humanity. By remaining closed in her arduous and dutiful role at home, in her banal occupation, in a physical environment that is a real cesspool of dirty and emotionally choleric water, Eveline has blocked her own human development will she ever have the capacity to truly love, feel, connect to something outside of herself Having been complicit in the abortion of her nascent personal identity, Eveline allows herself to present herself as an empty host in which paralysis can infect. her debilitating illness. She is consigned to a life of mortal wakefulness, a concept revisited and taken to stunning literary and emotional heights in Dubliners' longest and final episode, "The Dead." Arguably the most complex and layered of the fifteen stories that make up Dubliners, "The Dead" demonstrates the intense force with which paralysis dulls the senses, prevents individuals from achieving happiness, impedes the understanding of fundamental human truths and, in essence, it demands a form of spiritual and evolutionary death. However, what if the presence and influence of paralysis on the individual, the dangerous ease with which it unconsciously inculcates and breeds complacency in the psyche, were not so much reversed or cured, but recognized? What is the flip side of paralysis if not epiphany, the acquisition of knowledge and, therefore, the achievement of personal freedom? In “The Dead,” the main character, Gabriel Conroy, is another Dubliner afflicted by the paralysis embodied by his city. , and highlighted by his relentless self-obsession and solipsism. The story places him at the home of his aunts, Kate and Julia Moran, as part of a lively Christmas dinner and celebration. An academic, both as a professor and a part-time book reviewer, Gabriel is a man who lives and thinks within the confines of his inner self. Attempts to form a definition of self and identifies in relation to others along superficial lines. During the night's festivities, Gabriel is planning to give a grand and impressive speech and spends a considerable amount of time preparingmentally for the occasion, selecting the exact quotes and original jokes he will use to showcase his intellectual prowess. Gabriel is aware of the disparity in sophistication and pure "bookish" knowledge that exists between himself and the other guests: he was hesitant about Robert Browning's jokes because he feared they would be over the heads of his listeners. Some recognizable quotes from Shakespeare or the Melodies would be preferable. The indelicate clicking of the men's heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their level of culture was different from his. However, Gabriel's intense insecurity softens any implicit smugness and lends itself to a characterization of a man eager to please rather than an elitist braggart. Early in the night, addressing the young maid Lily, Gabriel makes the unwise mistake of conjecturing, "Or... I guess one of these fine days we'll come to your wedding with your young man, eh?" when she informs him that she has completed her school studies for the year. Offended by the offhand suggestion, Lily retorts, "The men they are now are just talk and what they can get from you," and suddenly, indicating her anger, walks away. Gabriel harbors embarrassment over this incident, the dark stain of which colors his thoughts throughout the night, including his reluctance to convey any trace of snobbery in his speech: He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poems to them that they couldn't understand. They would think he was giving vent to his higher education. He would fail them just as he had failed the girl in the pantry. He had struck the wrong tone. His entire speech was a mistake, from first to last, a complete failure. Thus, Gabriel is clearly an externally defined character, motivated by his fear of judgment and disapproval, his identity the product of the capricious perceptions of others, rather than the extension of any genuine, well-developed, self-guided notion of personality . In this sense, Gabriel is the figure of a walking dead, moving through life without truly knowing himself, detached from his environment, yet unaware of this debilitating disconnection. He has been so conditioned, so socialized to the point of paralysis, that the point at which his more artificial, calculated and fragile "automatic" self ends and his authentic self begins has been completely erased. That is, until his wife hears an eerily familiar melody and, through the visceral rush and raw emotion of her memory, illustrates to him how a dead man, a shadow, can somehow "be" more alive, have an impact on another more deeply, than Gabriel ever did while awake. The night's festivities have continued into the next day, as signaled by the "penetrating morning air", and the remaining guests are finally preparing to return home. Before leaving, however, Gabriel must find his wife Gretta, who has disappeared unexpectedly. Gabriel glimpses Gretta, leaning against her body at the top of the stairs, straining, Gabriel assumes, to listen for a distant sound. But Gabriel, in his physical and figurative paralysis, is unable to hear what his wife is apparently experiencing: "Gabriel was surprised by her immobility and also strained his ear to listen. But he could hear little except the noise of the laughter and discussions on stage. steps, some chords played on the piano and some notes of a male voice singing." By striking this curious pose, engaged in an activity suffused with mystery and quiet intrigue, Gretta loses all her recognizable qualities and becomes an enigma to Gabriel. He abstracts her, in a move that betrays her inability to connect on a human levelwith the unfamiliar, and reconciles the internal conflict caused by his uncertainty by considering it "a symbol of something". Even within this deeply organic experience, Gabriel is unable to express himself in emotional terms. He immediately turns to himself, as is his custom, and distances himself from the very personal moment by contextualizing it in the context of art and the academic world: "If he were a painter, he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat it would show the bronze of her hair against the darkness, and the dark panels of her skirt would highlight the light ones of Distant Music she would call the painting if she were a man, however, as a husband and lover, Gabriel is not sure how relate to this vision of his wife. Gabriel is right, however, because Gretta is symbolic in her deep red "terracotta" and "salmon pink" dress, with the wave of color suddenly assaulting her cheeks as she turns to face Gabriel. , with her "eyes that shone" with the vibrant light of life, is a figure of genuine experience, of warmth and active feelings, and she transmits this attitude so powerfully that it ignites in Gabriel a kind of passion hitherto hidden from the reader. More importantly, this moment plants the seeds of epiphany in Gabriel, as he begins to recognize the festering abyss of routine, boredom, emotional frigidity, and dusty ennui into which their relationship has sunk: a wave of joy yet tenderest escaped from his life. heart and flowed in a warm current along his arteries. Like the tender fires of the stars, moments of their life together, which no one knew or would ever know about, broke through and illuminated his memory. He longed to remember those moments, to make her forget the years of their boring existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy. For years, he felt, he had not soothed either his soul or hers. Their children, his writing, her domestic worries had not extinguished all the tender fire of their souls. Gabriel is excited, stimulated and moved; however, this shift from a self-centered and “mental” state to one of raw, lively feelings is not interpreted as hopeful or optimistic. Rather, Gabriel's emotional outburst is silly and pathetic, indicative of both his naivety and the irreversible effect that paralysis has had on his ability to "get" others. He is not the source of Gretta's happiness or fulfillment. He is not responsible for the deluge of emotions by which she seems to have been overwhelmed. He is not, as he would like to be, the "master of his strange mood". In a revelation that evokes in Gabriel a bitter humiliation, "a shameful consciousness of his own person" at the height of his arousal, Gretta admits that the thoughts currently assaulting his soul concern "that song, The Lass of Aughrim" and the I remember the boy who once sang it, Michael Furey. Thrown back into his default disconnected mode, without words or understanding, and left as a little boy alone with a series of questions, Gabriel asks, "And who was this person a long time ago? Someone you were in love with?" Although he never directly answers that question, the sadness and longing that sadly exude from the words of his vague answers convince Gabriel that his assumptions are correct. Yes, this was a boy she loved who died in the midst of their acquaintance. Gabriel asks: "And what did Gretta die of, so young? Was it consumption?" Consumption would be the simplest and most logical explanation, so it's no wonder that this is Gabriel's first thought. But no, his death was caused by something more incomprehensible, more dangerous and mysterious than consumption. While.