Innocence to Experience in the first 3 stories in Dubliners

Inspired by fellow blogger Charles May have started re-reading James Joyce's "Dubliners," surely one of the great if not the greatest story collections of all time. On coming back to Dubliners after many years I'm struck right away by how contemporary each of the (first 3 at least) stories feels. It's partly attributable to what the editor of my edition calls an "open form," that is, a conscious and direct rejection of the well-crafted popular stories of the 19th century, in particular those with plot twists and clear conclusions. These stories are all moments in time (or more accurately in remembered time) with no shape other than the duration of the event - a form so obvious and common now as to seem to be a cliche (many writers, including the great Irish contemporary William Trevor, push back against this openness and strive often for stories with an arc, with a definitive conclusion); Joyce's open style is as influential and enduring as the free or open verse of his modernist contemporaries Pound and Eliot - what was then avant garde has become the norm and is often misappropriated by those who think the open form is a lack of form and lack of constraint - it is a constraint and a discipline, in another way. The first 3 stories: each is a memory of a different type of first encounter - first meeting with death, with escape, and with love - and each ends with a sense of awakening to danger and disappointment: the dead priest in The Sisters was humiliated, the boys in The Encounter are threatened by a vagrant man and not as "free" as they'd thought, the young man in Araby never buys a gift for the girl he's been admiring - that is, life is full of difficulties and disappointments, and moving from innocence to experience is a matter of encountering sorrow and shame - and perhaps much later understanding these emotions.