The Role and Representation of Betrayal in the Irish Short Story since Dubliners

This chapter examines the emergence of betrayal as a central theme in James Joyce’s work and tracks its influence on subsequent Irish fiction. It explains how Joyce saw betrayal everywhere he looked: in Irish history, in the novel as a form, and in his own life. Already apparent in his earliest writings, Joyce’s major work represents a relentless dissection of the anatomy of betrayal in all its shapes and degrees. This obsession, moreover, was to have a lively afterlife in subsequent Irish literary discourse as generations of writers, from Frank O’Connor and Elizabeth Bowen to Bernard MacLaverty and Anne Enright, returned to this theme time and again until, following the economic and ethical crises of the early twenty-first century, society at large learned to speak the Joycean language of betrayal.