محمدرضا زارع

story from Dubliners has received immense critical reception over the years and has been studied through various critical frameworks. However, its potential for analysis based on Hegelian dialectic has been largely overlooked. Considering the last episode of the story as a moment of epiphany and self-realization, the study seeks to discuss how the protagonist’s development of consciousness can be interpreted based on the three stages of Hegelian dialectic: Understanding (Idealization of Mangan's sister and the bazaar), Dialectical (faced with contradiction at the bazaar), and Speculative (the final epiphany). The analysis demonstrates how the narrator’s initially fixed determinations and alienated consciousness in the understanding stage face their contradiction at the dialectical moment, resulting in the final epiphany, which mirrors the last stage of the dialectic where contradictions are resolved and self-realization is achieved. Further, based on the principles of Hegelian dialectic rooted in philosophical idealism, the study not only asserts that the narrator’s consciousness evolves through a process driven by contradiction, but it also interprets the narrator’s journey from naïve idealization to self-realization as a universal process of maturation. To avoid a mechanical and rigid application of the dialectical method, the analysis relies on close textual reading to identify the elements that contribute to each moment of the dialectic and deeply contextualizes the argument to deviate from oversimplification of the text.