Anton Chekhov and James Joyce
Yuna Song
It is undeniable that Anton Chekhov and James Joyce are both virtuoso of writing, and I came to admit this more strongly by reading their works in class. However, the overall mood of their work was clearly different, and the way they communicated the theme of their story and the writing style seemed to have the main difference.
The first difference I felt between the two was the relationship between universality and specificity. The works of Anton Chekhov and James Joyce both reveal universality and specificity through their stories. However, Anton Chekhov seemed to convey special and specific messages such as religion, private life and public life, and happiness by describing very general and sufficiently realistic events based on realism-based descriptions. On the contrary, James Joyce describes the characters' stories in a relatively dense style in a special context of Ireland, but in conclusion, he conveys implications that can be applied regardless of time or different groups of people. The reason why I was always confused about what James Joyce was really trying to say through his story after reading his writings was maybe also because he wanted to convey a very broad and universal theme to the readers, allowing them to interpret and apply the message in their own perspectives.
On top of that, just as mentioned above, Anton Chekhov's writing seemed to be more straightforward compared to James Joyce's writing. The range of interpretations possible was much broader in Joyce's stories. However, from the perspective of writing style, I liked James Joyce better since Joyce seemed to be better than Chekhov in terms of precision, detail, and expressiveness in developing the story.
In conclusion, these are the differences between Anton Chekhov and James Joyce I thought of. However, in that they used 'symbols' excellently and included numerous symbolic elements in the story, both writers also share big parts in common. Furthermore, the fact that it made me feel the joy of literature in the process of interpreting the symbols they hid may also be a commonality between them. (340 words)
Great post and I agree completely. Joyce writes far more deeply sentence for sentence, but also wrote a lot less during his career. Both are great models for the modernization of literature and the true art of Short story writing. Keep up the excellent effort.
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