Joyce was born in Dublin into a middle-class family. He attended the Jesuit Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, then, briefly, the Christian Brothers run O'Connell School. Despite the chaotic family life imposed by his father's unpredictable finances, he excelled at the Jesuit Belvedere College and graduated from University College Dublin in 1902. In 1904, he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle, and they moved to mainland Europe. He briefly worked in Pula and then moved to Trieste in Austria-Hungary, working as an English instructor. Except for an eight-month stay in Rome working as a correspondence clerk and three visits to Dublin, Joyce resided there until 1915. In Trieste, he published his book of poems Chamber Music and his short story collection Dubliners, and he began serially publishing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the English magazine The Egoist. During most of World War I, Joyce lived in Zürich, Switzerland, and worked on Ulysses. After the war, he briefly returned to Trieste and then moved to Paris in 1920, which became his primary residence until 1940.
Joyce, influenced by the French Symbolists, believed in the impersonality of the artist, as T.S. Eliot did. The artist's task was to render life objectively in order to give back to the readers a true image of it. This necessarily led to the isolation and detachment of the artist from society. His style, technique and language developed from the realism and the disciplined prose of Dubliners, through an exploration of the characters' impressions and points of view, through the use of free direct speech, to the interior monologue with two levels of narration. So language broke down into a succession of words without punctuation or grammatical connections, into infinite puns, and reality became the place of psychological projections, of symbolic archetypes and cultural knowledge.
Dubliners consists of 15 short stories; they all lack obvious action, but they disclose human situations and moments of intensity, and lead to a moral, social or spiritual revelation. The opening stories deal with childhood and youth in Dublin; the others, advancing in time and expanding in scope, concern the middle years of characters and their social, political or religious affairs. Modernist novelist, was hostile to city life, finding that it degraded its citizens. In fact, his Dublin is a place where true feeling and compassion for others do not exist, where cruelty and selfishness lie just below the surface. The last story, “The Dead”, was a late addition and can be considered Joyce's first masterpiece. It summarises themes and motifs of the other 14 stories of the collection but it functions more as an epilogue.
Everyone in Dublin seems to be caught up in an endless web of despair. Even when they want to escape, Joyce's Dubliners are unable to because they are spiritually weak. The description in each story is realistic and extremely concise, with an abundance of external details, even the most unpleasant and depressing ones. The use of realism is mixed with symbolism, since external details generally have a deeper meaning. The name of certain objects is carefully chosen and stands out from the naturalistic context in which they are placed. For example, the choice of the term 'street organ, which is also called 'harmonium' in Eveline, takes on a symbolic meaning. Religious and even colour symbolism is broadly used in the collection. Joyce thought that the function of symbolism was to take the reader beyond the usual aspects of life through the analysis of the particular. To this end he employed a peculiar technique called 'epiphany’, that is, 'the sudden spiritual manifestation' caused by a trivial gesture, an external object or a banal situation , which reveals the character's inner truths.