Through Joyce's Looking Glass: Dubliners and the Parable Form.

This essay explores James Joyce's engagement with Biblical parables in Dubliners. Like parables, Joyce's stories employ realistic situations, vivid imagery, and puzzling endings to prompt readers into moral reflection. Joyce's stories also draw upon specific Biblical parables. In "The Boarding House," Joyce inverts the Parable of the Ten Virgins to illuminate the disconnect between love and duty in Irish society. In "A Painful Case," he draws upon the Parable of the Great Banquet to highlight the implications of individual and societal inhospitality. Examining Joyce's parabolic method adds to the growing conversation about Joyce's sustained interest in Scripture and Christian thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]