Joyce`s celebrated short-story sequence provides a vivid and disturbing picture of early 20th-century Dublin and its inhabitants, whom Joyce saw as trapped in a repressed and stultifying environment. The stories are divided into five types: childhood, adolescence, marriage, maturity, and various aspects of public life, including politics. They embody Joyce`s belief in the value of what he called epiphanies--insights into life that can be compared to the religious concept of the Epiphany, and that Joyce believed art can provide via the transformation of mundane events. The last story, The Dead --the brilliant and moving dissection of a failed marriage--actually takes place on the Feast of the Epiphany.