The Irish people in Joyce`s Dubliners are suffering from the status of `the double other`, the is, they are captivated by the colonialism imposed by the empire and the totality of violence and paralysis permeating the city of Dublin. Without understanding the logic of "otherness" which controls their lives, the Irish people simply place their lives in the hands of the circulative structure of oppression and victimage. However, the resistant spirit against the otherness of the Dubliners implied by Joyce in Dubliners succeeds in expressing then-current situation of Dublin`s paralysis in the raw in the commonest language, enabling the reader to question the basic source of the paralysis. This intention of the author`s can be manifested by reading Joyce`s work in the light of Mikhail Bakthin`s principle of "heteroglossia." This kind of reading helps the reader interpret the realistic description of the phenomena as the starting point of post-colonial resistance against the source of the paralysis. As a matter of fact, however, Dubliners reveals something more than the post-colonial pathos as such. For even though the first intention of Joyce as the author of this book was to help the Dubliners recongnize their present status as `the oppressed other,` by reflecting themselves in the mirror of other people`s lives, Bakhtin`s heteroglossia or hybrid construction leads them to discover in themselves another `other that oppresses.` Most of the heros in Dubliners, seemingly living in the center of paralysis without awareness of their own situation, are helped to recognize their paralyzed situation by the narrative technology of Joyce the writer. However, it is only when they can find out `the other in me` that is not oppressed but oppressing another `other` in spite of themselves that the true possibility of escape from the paralysis can come true. The combination of Joyce`s resistant narrative and Bakhtin`s principle of heteroglossia as a tool of interpretation thus successfully hepls the Dubliners and the reader as well anticipate a new philosophical and aesthetic discourse in James Joyce`s Dubliners. |