James Joyce: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1882 to 1941
Quick answer: James Joyce craft file: Dubliners, the epiphany, the story that ends in paralysis, "Araby", "Eveline", "The Dead", and what his fifteen stories teach.
Quick facts
- Born: 1882, Rathgar, Dublin
- Died: 1941, Zurich, aged 58
- Wrote in: English
- Known for: "Araby", "Eveline", "The Dead"
- Signature move: The ending that arrives at understanding and does not move
- Start with: "Araby" (1914), six pages
Joyce wrote one book of stories, fifteen of them, most before he was twenty-five, and spent nine years getting it printed because publishers feared its plain words and real Dublin names. Dubliners is arranged as a life: childhood, adolescence, maturity, public life, and the long final story about a dance. Every story ends in a moment of seeing, and almost none of them ends in a change.
What he actually does on the page
He ends on a sight rather than an event. "Araby" (1914) sends a boy to a bazaar to buy something for the girl next door; he arrives late, the stalls are closing, a young woman flirts with two men and asks him idly if he wants anything, and he does not. The last sentence is his: "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." Nothing has happened. The boy has seen himself, which in Joyce is the only event there is.
He writes paralysis as a physical fact. "Eveline" (1914) gives a nineteen-year-old a sailor who will take her to Buenos Ayres and a father who will not let her go; she sits at the window with the dust in her nostrils for most of the story and then, at the North Wall with the boat waiting, she grips the iron railing and cannot move. Joyce ends with her face showing no sign of love or farewell or recognition. The story's whole argument is in her hands on the rail.
He uses the plain word on purpose. His phrase for the style of Dubliners was scrupulous meanness: no ornament, no adjective that does not report. "The Dead" (1914) keeps the rule across fifty pages of a dance in exact social detail, so that Gabriel Conroy's collapse in the hotel room lands on ground the reader knows.
The signature move
The ending that sees and does not move is dissected best in "The Dead". Gabriel has given his speech, joked about his galoshes, watched his wife Gretta listening to a song on the stairs and desired her. In the hotel she tells him about Michael Furey, who stood in the rain under her window at seventeen and died a week later. Gabriel understands that he has never felt anything like that for anyone, and he lies beside his sleeping wife while the snow falls on Dublin and on the grave in Galway. The last sentence widens to the whole country, "upon all the living and the dead", and Gabriel has not moved and will not. Impact & Resonance is worth only 10 of Writory's 100, and this is the passage judges have in mind when they award it: the paragraph after the story is over that makes the story larger.
Stories to read first
Seven of the fifteen, in the book's order.
What to steal for your own stories
Exercises drawn from the stories.
What not to copy
The epiphany has become a formula. A century of stories that end with a character quietly realising something has made the move look like a trick, and used without Joyce's exact preparation it reads as a shrug with ambitions. Take the plain word, the body's decision and the widening; earn the sight.
Life at a glance
- 1882: Born in Rathgar, Dublin, the eldest of ten surviving children
- 1904: "The Sisters", the first Dubliners story, appears in the Irish Homestead; leaves Ireland with Nora Barnacle in October
- 1905: Sends the Dubliners manuscript to the publisher Grant Richards from Trieste
- 1907: Writes "The Dead", the last and longest story
- 1914: Dubliners finally published after nine years of disputes over its contents
- 1916: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- 1922: Ulysses
- 1941: Dies in Zurich
What writers can take from this
- End on what is seen, not what is done.
- Let the body make the decision the mind cannot.
- Remove every adjective that does not report.
- Give your city real streets you know, or none.
- Widen the last paragraph past the character, then stop.
Try it yourself
A person has agreed to leave (a house, a city, a marriage) and the moment to go has arrived. Write the last fifteen minutes in under 900 words, in the plainest prose you can manage. The decision must be made by the body, not stated by the mind. End on one sentence in which the character sees themselves clearly, and do not let them move after it.
Questions
What is James Joyce's best short story?
"The Dead" (1914) is almost universally ranked first and is often called the finest story in English. "Araby" (1914) is the most taught, and "Eveline" (1914) the most compact.
How did Joyce influence the short story?
He made the epiphany, the quiet moment of self-recognition, the standard modern ending, and Dubliners showed that a collection could be built as a single argument. Almost every literary story written since owes him a debt, usually unacknowledged.
Is James Joyce hard to read?
Dubliners is not. The stories are short, the sentences plain and the plots simple; the difficulty is only that the meaning is carried by detail rather than statement. Save Ulysses for later.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory story contest
Enter the Writory Short Story Contest and have your own story read and scored out of 100. Entries close 25 November. That first entry makes you a Writorian.