James Joyce wrote just one collection of short stories, but it ranks among the finest in world literature. His influence on the form is as great as that of his near-contemporary Anton Chekhov. Between them their innovations(革新) – informed most discernibly(明显地=obviously, noticeably, conspicuously), in Joyce's case, by Ibsen, French symbolist poetry and the Irishman George Moore – have influenced nigh-on(几乎=nearly; almost) every short story writer of the last 100 years.
Dubliners (《都柏林人》，乔伊斯的短篇小说集), a work of what Terence Brown has called "embryonic(萌芽的) modernism", pushed the short story collection into new areas. Its 15 stories function perfectly well in isolation, but reading each as part of a whole creates unique effects. (它的15篇小说单篇读完美无缺，但若将每篇都读作某个整体的一部分，则会产生独特的效果。)Their themes, concerns and meanings overlap(交叉) and reverberate(回响). Most obviously, all 15 stories take place in Dublin. Secondly, they are ordered so that the book charts life "under", as Joyce explained, "four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life." From this grounding, a range of experience is explored: love, marriage, employment, politics, religion and death. Deeper within this superstructure subtler(更微妙的) patterns occur; concealed associations that might or might not be detected by the reader: Joyce's signposting(路标) is subtle, often to the point of obscurity(模糊不清).(在这个大结构下面还有更加微妙的模式，暗藏着各种联系，读者也许能发现，也许不能发现：乔伊斯设置的路标非常微妙，经常到让人看不清楚的地步。)
Joyce called these stories "epiclets"(小史诗). He wrote them in Dublin, Zurich, Pola, Rome and Trieste between 1903 and 1907, but publishers' concerns about their content meant Dubliners didn't appear until 1914. Discussing the stories in letters, Joyce wrote that "My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis(瘫痪)."
For Joyce, "paralysis" represents a moral failure resulting in the inability to live meaningfully. (对乔伊斯而言，“瘫痪”意味着精神崩溃，导致不能在生活中找到意义。) It appears on the first page of the first story, "Two Sisters", in a sentence that offers a key to the whole book:
"Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word Simony in the Catechism."
Here the "paralysis" is both literal, in the case of a dying priest after his third stroke, and moral: "Simony" takes aim at the Catholic church's corrupting stranglehold on Irish society (culminating in the gleefully satirical Grace); "gnomon" is somewhat different, being more about form than content (a gnomon is a parallelogram with a section removed, as well as the shadow-casting part of a sundial). The word is a cryptic(神秘的) warning to the reader that these stories contain many absences, not least traditional plot, character and scene-setting.
These absences are part of what Joyce referred to as the style of "scrupulous meanness" with which he wrote Dubliners, meaning the frugality (节俭)he applies to language, image and emotion. The approach has since become a type. As Joyce Carol Oates(欧茨，美国当代著名作家) has said, "the Joycean short story is immediately recognisable as a sub-genre in which the directness of the prose and the suggestive ellipsis of poetry are blended". Few, however, can achieve what Joyce did with such sparseness. In Dubliners, as Lance St John Butler says, "the line from linguistic detail to narrative meaning is direct ... form is content; the language and even the grammar of Dubliners are the stories' meaning."
Through his language, most notably his mastery of free indirect style(自由间接引语), which confers the intimacy and inflection of first-person storytelling on third-person narration, Joyce subtly lays the ground for each "epiphany"(顿悟): the moment, towards which each of these stories build, when pointlessness gathers itself, however briefly, into something revelatory. (通过语言，尤其是对自由间接引语的大师般的应用，让第三人称叙述具有了第一人称般的亲密和内省，乔伊斯微妙地为每一次顿悟都奠定了基础：所谓顿悟，就是每一篇故事走向的那个时刻，各种无意义堆积到最后，变成某种启示。)The most famous of these comes at the end of "The Dead", when Gabriel Conroy envisions the snow that is falling all across Ireland that night. This moment underlines Dubliners' unique unity as a collection: read alone, as Florence L Walzl has noted, Gabriel's epiphany seems something like "redemption". Succeeding the 14 previous stories, however it is more "a recognition that he is a dead member of a dead society". Indeed, with the line "the snow falling faintly through the universe ... upon all the living and the dead", Joyce performs a stunning inversion: now the frustrated, egotistical(自我的) Gabriel is "dead", and dead Michael Furey, who loved Gabriel's wife, lives on in memory.
It is no coincidence that this complexly patterned sequence should begin and end with stories – "Two Sisters" and "The Dead" – that have interchangeable titles. Their endings are twinned, too. As David G Wright says: "[Two Sisters] begins with a boy standing in the street, looking through a dimly lighted window and imagining the death of the man inside, while 'The Dead' ends with a man looking out through a window towards a dim light from the street, reflecting on human mortality in general and on the account of a particular dead boy which his wife has just related to him." Having ranged across the city and its suburbs, Dubliners' opening and closing scenes take place just a street away from each other: like the circular wandering of the swindler Lenehan in "Two Gallants", our journey through the paralytic stasis of Dublin leaves us – physically, if not intellectually or emotionally – right where we began.(《都柏林人》描写了都柏林城及其郊区，其开篇和结尾的场景相距不过一条街而已：就如《护花使者》中那个骗子连罕在街上转圈一样，我们在都柏林死一般的瘫痪状态中穿行，结果又回到了出发的地方，不仅是身体上，也可能是心智上和情感上。)
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