Dubliners is the first-born of Joyce's central canon (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake). Though now considered a masterpiece, its delayed publication altered its public reception. Though Joyce was astonishingly young (twenty-five years of age at the time of the completion of "The Dead"), the collection never saw print until he was thirty-three years old. By that time, Joyce was already publishing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in serial form in The Egoist. The stream-of-consciousness experiments of Portrait and Ulysses attracted for more attention than the more straightforward narrative style in Joyce's short stories. For many years, the magnificent accomplishment in Dubliners was eclipsed by Joyce's experimental novels.

Dubliners is a powerful work in its own right, containing some of the most finely wrought short stories in the language. None of the tales show the marks of a sloppy young writer: tone is distinctive and powerful, emotional distance is finely calibrated, and Joyce moves easily between terse, bare-bones narrative and meticulous detail. There is no stream-of-consciousness; in fact, protagonists (including first-person narrators) at times nearly withdraw from the narrative, leaving the reader alone with only the basic facts of the story. Although some readers have complained that the autobiographical Portrait tends toward self-indulgence, in Dubliners Joyce proves his ability to enter the souls of people far removed from himself. His acute grasp of character is everywhere, and is often displayed with a remarkable conciseness and precision.