James Joyce employs windows as a leitmotif to elicit the theme of paralysis in various contexts in Dubliners. The lighted window supposes darkness as background and its square shape visualizes the frame of consciousness paralyzed in the society. Windows and mirrors manifest the desire of Dubliners to escape from the wasteland of Dublin, and their awareness of the difficulty of crossing the line. Windows, in contrast to doors, imply a passive and indirect escape. Windows provide a literal and figurative in-between boundary space framing an observer`s view in Dubliners. Windows expose an outlet to child characters in “The Sisters” and “Araby.” However, in “Eveline,” an adolescent story, they suggest a borderline between the female character`s hard times and adventurous future, rather than a real escape through a door. Moreover, windows, along with a newspaper, function as an interpretative frame through which to look into Mrs. Sinico`s life and death in “A Painful Case.” “The Dead,” as a coda, recapitulates the theme of windows and mirrors as they reflect and refract the gazes between Gabriel and Gretta Conroy. Dubliners can be seen as a mirror that invites a gaze of self-reflection from the reader. Joyce`s symbolic deployment of these literary devices, starting with “the lighted square of window,” offers an appealing introduction to his self-conscious fictional world. The windows and mirrors in this short story cycle explore Joyce`s cyclical and cynical view of ‘dear dirty Dublin.’ The escape from Dublin is expected in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but Ulysses seems to be strictly confined to Dublin.