Dubliners is both of its time and very contemporary - like all great literature

Clearly as we move through James Joyce's great and seminal story collection, "Dubliners," the characters get older - it's like a biographical study using multiple personalities to chart the course of a life - and the mood gets even darker. The sorrows and frustrations that the young men feel in the first three or four stories in the collection still feel like the sorrows of youth that they can maybe outgrow or learn from or move beyond - as Joyce himself did, into exile. But the older characters later in the collection are bitter and lonely beyond repair - a terrifying portrait of the life of a city that Joyce both loved and despised, from afar. Think of three of the later stories: A Little Cloud, Counterparts, and A Painful Case. Each begins in an ordinary enough way: two old friends, one in from abroad, meeting for a couple of drinks; a beleaguered clerk harassed by his boss slips out for a pint; a solitary, cultured man meets a lonely woman at a concert - and then see where these stories go, how they unfold: in the first two cases, the protagonist goes home and takes his anger and frustration out on a young child; in the 3rd case, the man rejects any overture of love and sentiment and then reads that the woman he spurned was knocked down and killed by a train: he's a man without feelings looking back on an empty life (as in James's Beast in the Jungle?). These stories are even more profound when you consider how groundbreaking this material was a century ago - a hugely influential, painful collection that feels both of its time and very contemporary - like all of the greatest literature, in that regard.