In James Joyce’s the Dubliners, How Do the Characters’...

In â€Å"Araby†, â€Å"Eveline†, and â€Å"The Dead†, three short stories featured in James Joyce’s The Dubliners, the characters struggle with whether to live their lives with a structured routine or to seek opportunities, change, and adventure. These short stories center around everyday life for citizens of Dublin, Ireland in the early 20th century, when a choice between continuing the inherited tradition of routine and structure versus seeking any other form of life or adventure could be the most important decision in the peoples’ lives. With the terrible potato famine still in living memory and with Ireland seeking a new culture and identity, many of its citizens clung to their routine as means of survival. The quotidian routine of the character’s†¦show more content†¦The war is not between sentries and squadrons of bottles, but between the routine of life versus the hunger for opportunity. After dinner, the guests begin to dance . The guests partake in â€Å"memorized dance steps† and fall into habit and routine, one after the other. These structured dance steps rob the dancers of their individuality and creativity as uniform seizes the dance floor. The dancers are either forced to abandon their creativity and join in on the synchronized march of the automatons or be excluded from the group. Later on in the story, Gabriel learns from his wife about a previous lover. Gabriel enters a pensive and reflective state, in which he muses on the mass snow covering all of Ireland, which most likely covers the grave of Michael, his wife’s ex-lover, as well as the graves of all future Dubliners. The snow, the culmination of millions of individual and unique snowflakes melting together to form one entity of uniformity, became a metaphor for the all-encompassing routine of the characters in Dubliners, covering them in life and in death. Gabriel’s reflections towards the end of the novel give the shor t story its name of â€Å"The Dead†, which is what all of the routine and structure does the characters in The Dubliners. Despite all of the negative occurrences that the routine of the evening and of life bring upon Gabriel, he summons the courage to change his bleak outlook on life, vowing to have a more optimistic and open view on the world. In