Comparing Dubliners and To the Lighthouse Essay -- comparison compare

Comparing Dubliners and To the Lighthouse In Dubliners and To the Lighthouse, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf explore the depress results of lives devoid of growth or meaning versus those who dare to live their lives in spite of all strife and adversity. Joyce and Woolf are both concerned with the nonsense of stagnant lives, the first operating in pre-WWI Ireland, the second in England during and later the war. The bloodless and To the Lighthouse both reveal the despair of lives that occupy simply do not fill the short span of time amid birth and inevitable death. With The Dead, Joyce brings his lament for Irelands plight to its depressing notwithstanding strangely peaceful conclusion. Like all the previous stories in Dubliners, The Dead gives the reader a heavy dose of the social depravity of an Ireland snap by internal war. Everyone in the story seems so caught up in remembering the faded glory of the past that the living have rifle even more stagnant and perished than the dead themselves. Aunt Julia appears first as a faded flower her hair...was grey and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large balmy face. ...She had the appearance of a woman who did not know where she was or where she was waiver (187-188). Even this initial description seems to be of one near or even past death. Even while singing more attractively than she ever had (202-203), she seems more prepared for her funeral than Arrayed for the Bridal. She has both authored and, for each Christmas party she has ever thrown, performed this song about a wedding, and yet has neer herself married or produced children. Her life, though intermittently beautiful while it has lasted, ordain soon end in obscurity, fruitless, childless, wasted, as her ... ...ort of lasting meaning. What the lamented heroes of senescent had, and the zombie-like characters of the present generally lack, is the knowledge that the formation and maintenance of emotional bonds amongst human beings are the on ly meaningful enterprise of the human intention and the only worthwhile endeavor of the human life. Both authors make it cash in ones chips that those who spend their lives going through the motions of an unemotional society waste their lives as slowly and painfully as their bodies waste away. For them, the only way to real live ones life is to follow the feeling, the passion of the soul. Works CitedBenstock, Bernard. Critical Essays on James Joyce. G.K. Hall & Co. Boston, Massachusetts 1985.Joyce, James. Dubliners. bare-ass York Washington Square Press, 1998. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. New York Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1989.