Born James Augustine Aloysius Joyce on February 2, 1882 in Dublin, Ireland. Coming from a big family he was the eldest of ten children. His parents John Stanislaus Joyce and Marry Murray Joyce, didn't provide a stable a household, due to his father’s drinking and his lack of attention to the family finances. Joyce had a gift for writing and a passion for literature. He loved reading that he taught himself Norwegian so he could read Henrik Ibsen's plays in the language they'd been written. Joyce's family pushed him to get an education. Largely educated by Jesuits, Joyce attended the Irish schools of Clongowes Wood College and later Belvedere College before finally landing at University College Dublin, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with a focus on modern languages. Joyce had complex relationship with his native country and after graduating he left Ireland for a new life in Paris where he hoped to study medicine. He returned after upon learning that his mother had become sick. She died in 1903. He met Nora Barnacle, a hotel chambermaid who hailed from Galway and later became his wife, after three decades of meeting each other. The start of a literary career was not enough to keep him in Ireland and in late 1904 he and Nora first moved to Pula, Croatian city before settling in Trieste, Italy. There, Joyce taught English and learned Italian, one of 17 languages he could speak, that of which included Arabic, Sanskrit, and Greek. Joyce and Barnacle made their home in cities like Rome and Paris. To provide for his family, whom of which were his two kids Georgio and Lucia, he continued to find work as a teacher. Joyce continued to write and in 1914 he published his first book, Dubliners, a collection of 15 short stories. Two years later Joyce put out a second book, the novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and for a number of years was near blind. He suffered all his life from iritis, which is inflammation of the iris, glaucoma and cataracts; he underwent several surgeries, which is why he was near blind. At times Joyce was forced to write in red crayon on sheets of large paper. Towards the end of his life his vision was so bad, that he needed someone to guide him and required both very thick glasses and magnifying glasses in order to read. A year after Finnegan's publication, Joyce and his family were on the move again, this time to southern France in advance of the coming Nazi invasion of Paris. Eventually, the family ended up in Zurich, Switzerland. Sadly, Joyce never saw the conclusion of World War II, due to an intestinal operation, the writer died at the age of 59 on January 13, 1941.
In 1905, sent a manuscript of twelve short stories to an English publisher when he was twenty-three. "Two Gallants," "A Little Cloud," and "The Dead" were added later due to the delay in publishing. Dubliners was not published until 1914, although the stories were powerful, revolutionary work. The delay was due to concern about the frank sexual content and some of the charged political and social issues addressed in the collection. Five short stories I have chosen to read are: “The Sister,” “After the Race,” “A Little Cloud,” “A Painful Case,” and “The Dead.” "The Sisters," the first of the stories in Dubliners. "The Sisters" is elusive, withholding from us the extent of the understanding possessed by the nameless boy narrator. The boy, who remains