Character Movement in DublinersIn a letter to his publisher, Grant Richards, regarding his collection of short stories entitled Dubliners, James Joyce wrote:My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I, we chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me to be the center of paralysis. I tried to present him to the indifferent public from four aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written him for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the belief that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in resentment, and even more to distort, whatever he has seen and heard (Peake 2). his passion for Dublin shows up in the copious detail he uses in Dubliners. No street name, tower, pub or church is left unspecified. Joyce often boasted to his brother Stanislaus that if Dublin were to disappear from the face of the earth, it would not be difficult to rebuild it, simply based on Joyce's work (Walzl 169). Although all of the Dubliners stories were written while Joyce was in self-imposed exile from Ireland, Joyce describes the walks his characters took throughout Dublin, carefully noting every turn of every street corner. The movements noted by Joyce are not arbitrary, but symbolic. Joyce intended his audience to pay particular attention to the direction of the characters' movements. In most stories, the East symbolizes voluntary exile and escape. Westward movements indicate acceptance of corruption and eternal paralysis. In Dubliners, Joyce uses symbolic physical movement to trace the different stages of paralysis in his characters. In the three childhood stories, "Sist...... middle of paper ......ements of his book" (60) . The movements of Joyce's characters in his work Dubliners offer a telling picture of where Joyce predicted the city of Dublin was headed. Works Cited Bidwell, Bruce and Linda Heffer. The Joycean Way: a topographical guide for Dubliners and a portrait of the artist as a young man. Johns Hopkins: Baltimore, 1981.Gifford, Don. Joyce noted: notes for Dubliners and a portrait of the artist as a young man. University of California: Berkeley, 1982. Joyce, James. Dubliners. Penguin Books: New York, 1975.Peake, C. H. James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist. Stanford University: Stanford, 1977. Tindall, William York. A Reader's Guide to James Joyce. Noonday Press: New York, 1959. Walzl, Florence L. "Dubliners." A complementary study of James Joyce. Ed. Zack Bowen and James F. Carens. Greenwood Press: London, 1984.