Essay on Comparing Dubliners and To the Lighthouse

Comparing Dubliners and To the Lighthouse In Dubliners and To the Lighthouse, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf explore the depressing results of lives devoid of growth or meaning versus those who dare to live their lives in spite of all strife and adversity. Joyce and Woolf are both concerned with the meaninglessness of stagnant lives, the first operating in pre-WWI Ireland, the second in England during and after the war. The Dead and To the Lighthouse both reveal the despair of lives that occupy but do not fill the short span of time between birth and inevitable death. With The Dead, Joyce brings his lament for Irelands plight to its depressing yet strangely peaceful conclusion. Like all the previous stories in Dubliners,†¦show more content†¦At the dinner table, the party begins to discuss the greatest legitimate opera (209) singers of the past and present. Soon the reader must realize that all these celebrated figures are either long since dead, or living singers who are so obscure that only a single person has ever heard of them. It seems that the present society is totally devoid of all beauty, for the glory of the past is lost, and the buds and timid blooms of the present are fatally obscured. Yet still these people gather yearly around the massive banquet table to engage again and again in the same sort of conversation, as Gabriel himself notes: But yet, continued Gabriel, his voice falling into a softer inflection, there are always in gatherings such as this sadder thoughts that will recur to our minds: thoughts of the past, of youth, of changes, of absent faces that we miss here to-night. Our path through life is strewn with many such sad memories: and were we to brood upon them always we could not find the heart to go on bravely with our work among the living. We have all of us living duties and living affections which claim, and rightly claim, our strenuous endeavors. (214) Gabriels speech to the assembled party is in quite a strange tone. Like many other characters in Dubliners, these people are preoccupied with thoughts of those who have not lasted another Christmas. With his talk of our work among the