Joyce, James: 1882-1941

Dubliners, 1914 - Thematic Parallels: Desire for Freedom

Joyce, James: Dubliners, 1914
The topic of "Dubliners" is the stagnation and struggles of Dublin life, showing how people wrestle with desires for escape, freedom, or meaning, but rarely succeed.
The following books are thematically similar. They lend themselves well to being read in groups, compared with one another, or used to teach a similar topic over an extended period with a class:
- Chopin, Kate: The Awakening, 1899, ~200pp
  This novel centers on female desire for personal freedom and self-expression.
  - Both Chopin and Joyce explore individuals waking up to self-awareness but finding themselves paralyzed by social and cultural limits. Their characters crave freedom but remain trapped, and both works reveal the quiet tragedies of ordinary lives under oppressive norms.
- Henríquez, Cristina: The Book of Unknown Americans, 2014, ~280pp
  This novel examines immigrant experiences in America, themes of personal freedom and struggle.
  - Both works are, community-based narratives that turn the spotlight on ordinary people, showing how social structures create feelings of entrapment, dislocation, or longing. Both seek to give voice to people who might otherwise be invisible or ignored. They resist a single “hero” narrative and instead create a collective portrait of a community.
- Maugham, W. Somerset: The Moon and Sixpence, 1919, ~210pp
  This novel focuses on the pursuit of personal desire and freedom through breaking societal norms.
  - Both works interrogate the tension between social convention and individual freedom, dramatize alienation and paralysis, critique middle-class respectability, and use modernist narrative strategies to unsettle traditional storytelling. Where Joyce dwells on paralysis and failure, Maugham imagines the extreme pursuit of artistic freedom—but both reveal the costs of stepping outside (or staying inside) the structures of ordinary life.
- Souad: Burned Alive, 2003, ~220pp
  This is an autobiography representing a personal struggle against oppression and desire for freedom.
  - In both works, people are suffocated by societal norms that dictate how they can live, love, and speak. Despite differences in setting and form, they expose how individuals are trapped by oppressive social structures, silenced by cultural expectations, and often left paralyzed, unable to fully live freely.
List of general discussion questions on Desire for Freedom (pdf)
List of essay prompts on Desire for Freedom (pdf)