Discuss the nature of tragedy in Dubliners by James Joyce.

In the opening story "The Sisters" from The
Dubliners, you might find the answer to the question in the italicized words:
 gnomon, paralysis, and simony.  These form the heart of what plagues the characters in
these short stories.

Paralysis is the most pervasive cause
of the individual characters' tragedies.  The characters are trapped by their poverty,
routine, religion or sense of duty, or the past.  In "Araby," the narrator longs to
escape the drudgery of his surroundings and sees Mangan's sister as a key to that
escape.  Going to the bazaar to find her a gift gives him a sense of purpose, a mission
that blinds him to the drabness of his surroundings.  Bitter and disillusioned at the
end of the story, the narrator finds that there is no Araby in Dublin.  Eveline is
another character whose tragedy is her inability to escape; she is paralyzed by her
sense of duty, her obligations to her family, her fear of the unknown, and at the end of
the story she cannot go to Buenos Aires with Frank and becomes a "helpless
creature."

But the other two words are also keys to the
tragedies that face the characters in these stories.  Religious corruption or blindly
following religious routines is the heart of "The Sisters."  Many stories have the
symbol of a dead priest or empty chalice to show the inability of the church to provide
true inspiration to its members.

The gnomon is a
parallelogram with a smaller parallelogram taken out.  The idea of a missing piece or
obscured truth is prominent in many of the stories, but most specifically in "The Dead,"
when Gabriel realizes that he did not know his wife at all (a missing piece) and that he
cannot compete with a ghost from his wife's past.