Eighty-four years ago today, on January 13, 1941 (December 16, 1940 in the lunar calendar), Irish writer James Joyce passed away. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (February 2, 1882-January 13, 1941) was an Irish writer and poet, one of the most important writers of the 20th century. James Joy is an Irish novelist. Born on February 2, 1882 in Dublin, to a poor civil servant family. He was educated Catholic in a Jesuit school since childhood and prepared to become a priest. Before graduating from high school, he began to break with religious beliefs and the vulgar and boring social life of Dublin, and determined to devote himself to literature. In 1898, he entered University Dublin to specialize in modern languages. After graduating in 1902, he went to Paris to study medicine. In 1903, due to his mother's critical illness, he temporarily returned to his hometown and began to write short stories. After getting married in 1904, he traveled to Italy and Switzerland and announced a "voluntary exile", making a complete break with Ireland ruled by the Catholic Church. He has made a living teaching English in Rome, Trieste, Zurich and other places, and also engaged in creative writing. He settled in Paris in 1920 and specialized in writing novels. He died of illness on January 13, 1941. Joyce lived in exile in Europe for most of his life, but in his novels, the themes and characters are concentrated in Dublin. He believes that only by completely freeing himself from the influence of Irish religious, political and social life can he portray life in Dublin completely objectively. His first work was the collection of short stories "Dubliners"(1914). By describing the ordinary and trivial things in the daily lives of various Dublin citizens, he revealed the disillusionment and sadness brought by the social environment to people's ideals, hopes and pursuits., expressing contempt and disgust for Irish social customs. "Portrait of a Young Artist"(1916) is an autobiographical novella that describes the relationship between modern artists and society through the growth process of the protagonist Stephen DeDilus: to move towards art is to move towards exile. Joyce uses the technique of inner monologue to depict the protagonist's experience and the objective world through his inner activities, and uses different styles of language to express the thoughts and feelings of different periods such as childhood, childhood, and youth. The novel also puts forward a set of literary and artistic theories, arguing that drama is the highest and most perfect literary form because of its high degree of objectivity; writers should retire from their works, transcend the values of the middle class world, and objectively reflect life. This view has had a profound impact on contemporary Western literature. Joyce spent seven years writing his masterpiece Ulysses (1922). The protagonist of this novel, Liepole Bloom, is an advertising salesman for a Dublin newspaper. The novel uses many vivid details to describe the day-and-night experiences of this wandering and depressed citizen, his pleasure-seeking wife Molly, and a young student Stephen DeDilus, who is looking for a spiritual father. It is essentially a portrayal of people's loneliness and despair in modern Western society. Joyce compares the protagonist of the novel with Ulysses (i.e. Odysseus), the hero in Homer's epic "Odysseus", and his wandering in Dublin with Ulysses's 10-year wanderer. Moreover, the 18 chapters of the book correspond to the plots in Homer's epic one by one. Through comprehensive comparison, they exaggerate the decadence and degeneration of modern Western society and highlight the insignificance and sadness of human beings. Joyce extensively used the "stream of consciousness" writing technique in "Ulysses", forming a new style and becoming a pioneer in modernist novels. He not only deliberately innovated in choosing words and composing sentences, but also used a large number of allusions, quotations and myths. However, some paragraphs are not punctuated, giving them a vague feeling. After the novel was published, some of its words were criticized for being "obscene", so it was banned from distribution in Britain and the United States for a long time. It was not until U.S. Judge Wolsey made a decision to lift the ban on December 6, 1933 that this masterpiece was publicly available to readers in Britain and the United States. Joyce was almost blind in his later years, but he still immersed himself in writing. After more than ten years of arduous work, he completed his last novel,"The Wake for Finnegan"(1939). The author claims that this is one of his masterpieces. The novel revolves around the central theme of the cycle of death and resurrection in human history. It describes the dream experience of Ilwick, a Dublin tavern owner (who represents everyone), and expresses the final chaos of the contemporary world that has entered the death period. The characters in the dream can transform each other, and the plots in the dream have complex and changeable symbolic meanings. Joyce used his own original dream language to write dreams. In his works, he not only broke up English words and recombined them into blended words to give them multiple meanings, but also used multiple languages in multiple ways to form complex meanings. group, so this novel is more obscure than "Ulysses". Joyce's other works include lyrical poems "Chamber Music Collection"(1907) and "Poetry for a penny"(1927), and the play "Exile"(1918).