In The Dead, the last story in this collection, Gabriel Conroy recounts an anecdote about his grandfather and his hors…In The Dead, the last story in this collection, Gabriel Conroy recounts an anecdote about his grandfather and his horse, Johnny, who used to walk in circles to drive the grinding stone in a mill. One day, the grandfather harnessed the horse and took him out to a military review. But Johnny, disoriented as he passed by a statue of William III, started circling the monument stubbornly as if he were back at the mill. This little tale within a tale encapsulates perfectly the spirit and essence of Joyce’s Dubliners.At first glance, Joyce’s stories could be read as a series of naturalistic vignettes, “slices of life” depicting the insignificant day-to-day misfortunes of a few random Irish characters at the turn of the 20th century. Children playing in the street, young girls playing the piano, working men getting drunk and mouthing off at the pub… In a way, that is indeed what Dubliners is about: the shabby neighbourhoods, the outdated manière d’être, the constricted lives, the frustrated yearnings and the spiritual bleakness of those times. Dubliners is also a twin of A Portrait of the Artist, where Joyce focuses on minor characters rather than on Stephen Dedalus.Of course, there is more to these tales than meets the eye. Firstly, most of these trivial stories hark back to deeper cultural, even archetypal models: the Arthurian quest (Araby), or the voyage from Hell to Heaven (Grace) – Johnny, the horse, as an eternal and hopeless Sisyphus, etc. Secondly, Joyce also infuses these tales with the political arguments of his time: the debates around Irish identity, Protestantism and the influence of the Catholic Church, the unionist and the separatist movements (still topical today), and the general opinion that Ireland was being strangled by the crown of England – again, old Johnny going round and …