Sound Of Silence

Dubliners focuses its realistic narration on the inner world of the characters, which is different from the traditional form of realism. In each story, James Joyce presents an epiphanic structure to reveal the paralysis of his people and Dublin. My paper, text-oriented, is going to apply Lacanian psychoanalysis to the characters'psychology. As explicated in the paper, the tripartite of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real is the locomotive of the forming of epiphany. What is more, the paper employs a new perspective to interpret the characters as well as the moral of the stories. Through the gradual exploration into all sorts of psychic traces, the paper proves that the psychological world in the collection is highly structured and integrated.Taking the growth of the characters into consideration, the explications on the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real are distributed to different sections of Dubliners, which were originally divided by the author. The Imaginary could be found in the fancies of the children and adolescents; the Symbolic is the key factor dominating the adults and their social life; the Real only occurs in the last story, revealed by death.Many details of the characters'mental activities correspond to Lacan's theory on the structure of the unconscious. Firstly, the Imaginary is presented by fancies, in which the characters identify themselves with anarchistic images, thus achieving their ideal ego. However, the ideal ego does not last long in reality since it is formed from an unrealistic point of view. Secondly, the Symbolic order constrains the characters in the reign of symbols or"language". As a character realizes ego identification through symbols, he/she acquires an ego ideal in accordance with the rules of communication. However, the characters'view of the world can never be omniscient at this moment. Eventually, the Real is the projection of the whole material and psychic world beyond the comprehension by means of language. The Real is indefinite, returning only in the revelation of death.