Flower In Blue

  The Dead is a last short story in James Joyce's Dubliners story. The interesting fact about Joyce is that, in his letter to Grant Richards, he said this: I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to be the center of paralysis. Then a question is that, why did he described Dublin as a paralyzed city and wrote about it?   There are two main ways to interpret paralysis. Dubliners were written during the Irish Literary Renaissance, which was mainly conducted for the Irish to show that they could be independent of Britain. Joyce wrote Dubliners at a time when Ireland was under the British rule, the Irish were governed and had no independence. At the same time, Irish nationalism was stagnating cultural progression, placing Dublin at the heart of this regressive movement. In one of the short stories The Dead, the paralysis is described in a complex manner using many symbols and satires.   The paralysis Joyce mainly likes to criticize through The Dead(or probab...

Eveline:  moving forward   Everybody has their own habit. Someone might bite their nails till it bleeds, shake their legs, or wake up automatically at 6’o clock without the help of alarm bell. No matter what impact they have on you – negative or positive – there is one common ground that all habits hare: they are extremely hard to get rid of. In my case, I failed to fix my habit of biting my finger even though I tried for more than 5 years. It seems like we are so much used to them that it just became a part of ourselves. If not about habit, changing something big in life is not an easy decision to make in most cases.   In the novel Eveline, the main protagonist Eveline also has a dilemma between the old and the new. At home, she takes care of her sister and drunk, abusive father to keep the promise with her mother, who is no longer alive, to maintain the family as long as possible. At the same time, she falls in love with the man named Frank, who promised Eveli...

Growing up   When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before I had well eaten a dinner. The street and the houses grew somber as the evening deepened in the avenue. The space of sky above me was the color of ever-changing violet and towards it, the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. When the street started to glow by the falling sun and the voices of the kids faded beyond the twilight, I went out on the doorstep to call my brother in for his tea.   And there was this boy, who always hid back the door and watching me come and go in a distance. He often followed my way to the store, covering his face with an old brown book named ‘Dubliners,’ which should’ve been an action that required great courage. He seems like a bashful and innocent child whose cheeks might have easily turned into rose-petal red.   The first conversation I had with him was about the bazaar in Araby. It was the place that I was the most obsessed in at that time because th...

The world seems like a mixture of grey and blue. Dark cloudy sky was seen through a chink in the white curtains fluttering in the wind. It seems as if it will rain soon. The light in the room has been out for a long time. Useless articles were scattered on the messy floor helplessly. Only cold, gloomy atmosphere was lingering inside the room. Again, I came back home. I have a vague childhood memory. My family never spent time together. My mother was an accountant, who rarely came home. My father was a university professor, who was busy with his research project and school works. I always don’t know where they were. I don’t know where they were yesterday, and where they would be tomorrow. Since I was an only kid, I necessarily spent most of my time alone. One day, something that was supposed to come had come. Without any warning, they announced their divorce and asked me which side I will like to follow. Whatever decision I made, neither I nor my parents would care. I just stayed sil...

 We should be loyal; we should help others; we should tell the truth: we should be moral. There was human on the planet earth. For some reasons, they decided to gather and live together: they created society. After that, human-made something called ‘laws’ and ‘morals’ mostly to keep public order. Although it highly varies among societies due to the unique sociocultural backgrounds, they still share some similarities which are hard to declare in a few sentences. This social compact is never forced by divine being but by its benighted creations themselves. However, according to human nature, there is no such thing as justice, altruism, solicitude, and loyalty. At least they do not exist as an aim, but only as a mean. This nature has not changed since the birth of Adam on this planet. People are, and should be selfish to achieve their fundamental aim of survival. Why will history repeat itself? It is because, unlike the circumstances that have always changed, the essence of...