Voice, Boundary and Identity in the Works of James Joyce

This book is a study of the weaving and unweaving of particular subject positions within James Joyce’s major works (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegan’s Wake) through representations of voice, which necessarily negotiates identity, authority, and subjectivity. In the narrowest sense, voice reveals itself as a portion of the narrative which in turn stands as part of the discourse of a particular work. A movement to a more broadly conceived view of voice has it supersede the narrative and function throughout the discourse. Permutations of these concepts locate voice at nearly all levels of Joyce’s fiction. This work explores the myriad of ways that Joyce portrays and negotiates identity through voice and the conceptualization of boundaries that exist “in between” different and distinct subjectivities. The author explores those negotiative identities and subjectivities from within the conceptualization and representation of voice. More often than not, however, a study of voice reveals the inevitability of specific identities to merge and flow into one another, despite futile attempts to retain individuality. The space existing between two seemingly distinct voices blurs in Joyce’s fiction in the din of conversation and in the fuzziness of representation.