From James Joyces Stephen Hero to After The Race - Blending Narrator

From James Joyces Stephen Hero to afterwards The Race - Blending Narrator and Character James Joyces fragment of a novel, Stephen Hero, leaves the reader little fashion to interpret the text for themselves. The work lacks the tarradiddle distance that Joyce achieves in his later works. Dubliners, a work Joyce was writing concurrently, ostensibly employs a drastically different voice. A voice which leaves the reader room to make sentiments of their own. Yet it is curious that Joyce could produce these two works at the same time, one that minces the reader so straight, telling non c everyplace , while the other, Dubliners, searchs to bestow the reader the power of final interpretation over the characters it portrays. By changing voice from a teller who tells the reader to a narrator who shows the reader in Dubliners, Joyce has seemingly relinquished considerable control over his vision of Dublin. However, Joyces change of narrator yields him alternative forms of authorial so vereignty. In fact, Joyce guides the reader in a much more powerful expressive style in Dubliners without the readers knowledge. Through quick shifts in point of view and interjections that seem to be the voice of a character, yet be not directly linked to it, Joyce controls the stories in Dubliners more subtly and with more set up than the cobwebby declarations in Stephen Hero ever do. In her essay Oh Shes A exquisite Lady A Rereading of A Mother Jane E. Miller addresses the issue of judgment in the story. Although told in an aloof and anonymous third-person, the narrativeis always shifting, almost imperceptibly, from an verifiable stance to less neutral observations which, because of their perspective or particular survival of words, appear to be those of Mrs. Kearney. (Miller,... ...f him in the narration. These interjections in After the Race are not the complete rupture of objectivity that they are in Stephen Hero. Still, the effect is much the same. They channel the re ader rather than tell the reader how to judge. They exsert the reader a guide to the reading of After the Race in much the same way a legend acts for a map. This is not to say that phrases like this operate in every story of Dubliners as they do here. But in the story After the Race they give the reader important directions for reading much like the narrative wrangle does in A Mother. In addition, these phrases seem to be a much more polished version of the blunt preaching Joyce does in Stephen Hero. They operate on the reader subtly, blending the voice of character and narrator to produce a guide to the reading, not a usurpation of, as in Stephen Hero, the text.