Clerks and Counterparts: Dubliners and the Writing of Boredom

This essay reads Dubliners through the cultural and individual representation of boredom. It suggests that in this story collection Joyce incorporates the rhetorical style of bored urbanites, particularly clerks, to craft a unique approach that performs a tension between restive alienation and the fidgety agitation characteristic of the fractured modernization of Joyce's Ireland. The essay uses the image of clerks and their repetitive writing tasks to argue that, through this style, Joyce tried to capture a Dublin marked by temporal and spatial dissonance, where feelings of paralytic inertia are constantly stressed and haunted by the drive to move and change, creating the inarticulate restlessness of boredom that transforms Dubliners into a rich source of interpretive possibilities.