Ari Isaacs

3/21/11
Questions On The Quest For Knowledge

“Literature is the question minus the answer." When reading literature one is presented with a

merid of new or different ideas to the ones the reader has previously held. When you are reading

your mind is constantly trying to formulate if an ideas of the text you are reading are true or

false. You as the reader on some level want to validate your own ideas. If a statement or an idea

goes against your gut feelings or held beliefs you look at the information presented to you by the

author whether or not take the this new idea and assimilate it into your own.

The same is true when we as a reader are presented with questions. These questions can cover

dozens of topics ranging from religious truth to political thought. The text forces theses thoughts

into our heads. It makes us contemplate them and reflect on them. It forces us to look at the

issues and hopefully through constructive thought possibly come up with some answers.

This is extremely evident in the collection of short stories known a ​Dubliners​ By James Joyce.

The authors give us a window into another world. Not an imaginary on in the fashion of most

fiction but one that in its time was real, gritty and in your face. It gives us questions without a

single answer. This is most evident in the two stories Counterparts and Grace.

In these two stories we as the reader are given a question. I there salvation in religion. After a

brief reading we seem to be given two answers, but are we? Counterparts is the story of a man

beset by problems who turns to the bottle. At the end of the story he turns to his son who is

saying a prayer for his soul and beats him. Joyce Gives us a question; is religion truly effective in

saving someone from there fallings. He seems to give us the answer in the last paragraph

“O, pa don’t beat me, If you don’t beat me ill say a hail marry for you.” He still gets beaten
regardless of god’s grace. So one would be lead to believe that religion is ineffective in saving

one from their fallings.

Joyce then goes on to tell the story Grace in which a man is struggling with an addiction to the

drink. One would be lead to believe from Joyce’s earlier writings that religion is ineffective at

saving you from yourself. But that isn’t the case. In Grace after falling to the drink the man finds

salvation through god. “I find this wrong and this wrong. But with God’s Grace, I will rectify

this and this.” This is completely contrary to Joyce’s previous conclusion that religion isn’t ones

salvation; and that it can possibly be ones salvation.