[1] It presents a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.

Joyce felt Irish nationalism, like Catholicism and British rule of Ireland, was responsible for a collective paralysis.

A similar controversy developed, and Maunsel too refused to publish the collection, even threatening to sue Joyce for printing costs already incurred.

[17] The Dublin he remembers is recreated in the specific geographic details, including road names, buildings, and businesses.

)[18] Ezra Pound argued that, with the necessary changes, "these stories could be retold of any town", that Joyce "gives us things as they are... for any city", by "getting at the universal element beneath" particulars.

[19] Joyce referred to the collection as "a series of epicleti", alluding to the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.

[21] But he used the eucharist as a metaphor, characterizing the artist as "a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life".

[22] The theme of Dubliners, "what holds [the stories] together and makes them a book [is] hinted on the first page", the "paralysis" or "living death" of which Joyce spoke in a letter of 1904.

One critic has suggested that the concept is the basis of an overall narrative strategy, "the commonplace things of Dublin [becoming] embodiments or symbols .

[25] A later critic, avoiding the term "epiphany", but apparently not the concept, has examined in considerable detail how "church and state manifest themselves in Dubliners" as agents of paralysis.

[39] A colored print of the 12 promises hangs on Eveline's wall,[40] and there are resemblances between her and Margaret Mary Alacoque and between Frank, her "open-hearted" suitor, and the Sacred Heart.

Hugh Kenner argues that Frank has no intention of taking Eveline to Buenos Aires and will seduce and abandon her in Liverpool, where the boat is actually headed.

[44] That Eveline's print of the 12 promises made by the Sacred Heart hangs over a "broken" harmonium confirms the close similarity between the two suitors.

In "Circe", the Sacred Heart devotion is concisely parodied in the apparition of Martha Clifford, Bloom's pen pal.