Comparing Dubliners and To the Lighthouse Essay -- comparison compare

Comparing Dubliners and To the pharos In Dubliners and To the Lighthouse, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf explore the depressing results of lives devoid of growth or meaning versus those who dare to live their lives in spite of all discordance and adversity. Joyce and Woolf are both(prenominal) concerned with the meaninglessness of standing(prenominal) lives, the first operating(a) in pre-WWI Ireland, the second in England during and after the war. The knackered and To the Lighthouse both reveal the despair of lives that occupy but do not assemble the short span of time between birth and inevitable death. With The Dead, Joyce brings his lament for Irelands plight to its depressing yet strangely peaceful conclusion. handle all the previous stories in Dubliners, The Dead gives the reader a toilsome dose of the social depravity of an Ireland torn by internal war. Everyone in the story seems so caught up in remembering the faded nimbus cloud of the past that the living have beco me even more stagnant and perished than the dead themselves. Aunt Julia appears first as a faded boot her hair...was grey and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large flaccid face. ...She had the appearance of a char who did not know where she was or where she was going (187-188). regular this initial exposition seems to be of one near or even past death. Even while singing more beautifully than she ever had (202-203), she seems more disposed(p) for her funeral than Arrayed for the Bridal. She has both authored and, for every Christmas party she has ever thrown, performed this call about a wedding, and yet has never herself married or produced children. Her life, though intermittently beautiful while it has lasted, will soon end in obscurity, fruitless, childless, wasted, as her ... ...ort of lasting meaning. What the lamented heroes of old had, and the zombie-like characters of the present generally lack, is the intimacy that the formation and maintenance of emotional b onds between human beings are the further meaningful enterprise of the human spirit and the only worthwhile try of the human life. Both authors make it clear that those who spend their lives going through with(predicate) the motions of an unemotional society waste their lives as slowly and painfully as their bodies waste away. For them, the only way to truly live ones life is to stick to the feeling, the passion of the soul. Works CitedBenstock, Bernard. Critical Essays on James Joyce. G.K. Hall & Co. Boston, mummy 1985.Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York Washington Square Press, 1998. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. New York Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1989.