While the slim volume Dubliners is years (and indeed light-years) away from Ulysses in style and scope, the culture out of which Joyce drew his material is identical for both texts. Irish Catholicism, from which Joyce was, famously, not only disconnected but also disaffected, informs the pattern of ideas in the short-story collection and the novel. Indeed, the means by which Joyce develops his multiplicity of ideas and patterns the events of the narratives can be said to owe something to the parochial education--and the parochial society--that Joyce was at such pains to distance himself in the way he led his life. But Joyce could not escape the givens of his personal history, and he drew on it extensively. If he did so chiefly in order to make a literary project of delegitimizing its prescriptions and commenting critically on what he saw as the stultifying features of Irish experience, he also did so not least because his native culture served as an almost bottomless well of inspiration that uniquely enabled him to have his say about and against it with nuanced and deliberately problematized insight.
The biographical details of Joyce's life show how decisively he rejected the moral tenets of Catholicism and its hold on life experience in Ireland. His nonmarriage marriage to Nora Barnacle, his insistent atheism, and his deliberate self-exile have been cited in that regard (e.g., Cixous passim). The theme of exile, or more exactly the exile's return, dominates Ulysses, and Dubliners is dominated by the theme of clear-eyed critique from a perspective that sees long and therefore more sharp than that of the inhabitants of the culture who experience it too closely to have anything but a blurred or diffuse vision. Only an exile, for example, could watch Eveline experience the potentialities of the unknown away from Dublin as less desirable than the devil she knows--physical and verbal abuse from her father, a life of household drudgery, t...