이피퍼니와 아이러니:조이스의 『더블린 사람들』을 중심으로

Epiphany and Irony in Joyce’s Dubliners

This paper argues a new perspective on Joyce’s epiphany through some aspects of Irony and its style. Most studies on epiphany have focused on the explanation by Stephen in Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the artist as a Young Man and thereby understood it as the revelation of “Whatness” of a thing or an artistic response and its symbolic meaning in the mind. However, this definition does not apply to Dubliners where the epiphanies in the episodes rely rather on the ironic narrative strategy. For Joyce’s brother Stanislaus, epiphany is an “ironic observation” and according to Beja, it is the “dramatic context” caused by the difference and incongruity in the narrative context. Actually, the epiphanies in Dubliners rely on the ironic narrative with a double structure. The incongruities between what characters know or believe and what a narrator actually does or shows create situational irony. This similarity between epiphany and irony as analysed in this paper is what most readers find in the epiphanic episodes in Dubliners. Dubliners as a collection of Joycean epiphanies shows why and how Joyce’s epiphany should be understood and studied in relation with irony.