Dubliners Only the first three stories in the collection, the ones dealing with childhood, have first-person narrators; the remainder are told in the...

• So many characters in these stories want to leave Dublin, but no one ever gets out. Is this just a coincidence? What's holding everybody back? 

The Horse Dealer's Daughter

• How do you think the way Jack Ferguson is dressed up in earlier parts of the story helps you understand his personality?

• The narrator seems to emphasize the eye contact between Mabel and Jack. Identify in which sections of the story these eye contacts are emphasized and discuss how they contribute to the story's thematic concerns and development.

• Why does the narrator describe Jack Ferguson as "slave to the country-side"?

• What does Jack Ferguson think about working class people? What makes him think so?

• The pond is a major symbol in the story. Examine its symbolic value by providing quotations from the story. Discuss whether it always symbolizes the same thing whenever used or whether it is polysemic. What really happens in the pond?

• Towards the end of the story, after Mabel and Jack change their clothes, we can see a change in their behaviors. How? Why? For example, why does Mabel tell Jack that she does not like him "in those clothes"?