Although it was published in 1914, Dubliners had been completed nine years earlier, in 1905, but the delay in its public appearance had not been voluntary. Two publishers and a printer repeatedly objected to the work on moral grounds, and Joyce had stubbornly resisted accepting its modifications. However, those nine years served for the author to revise the texts and to add three new ones, giving the book even greater cohesion than it already had, and especially enriching it with the one that closes it, "Los Muertos", considered one of the best stories in the history of literature. Thus was born Dubliners, a collection of short stories that describe the rigid and stagnant Irish society of the time, subject to Catholic morality and the dictates of the British Empire; all this at a time when Irish nationalism was struggling hard to recognize the legitimacy of its demands.

Considered by critics as a preface to his later works, especially his great work Ulysses, Dubliners is constituted as the work that began Joyce's original, rich and complex narrative, and that achieved the liberation of artistic expression of the confinement in which she was plunged. An essential work, therefore, to better appreciate and understand the narrative of the Irish author.