Joyce's pic tures are no doubt drawn in part from his own youth, and the details that appear in the stories are steeped in nostalgia, pictured the way a young boy would see them. Memory acts on the common language made available in the form of metaphors, culling important bits, storing them and discarding other shards. We amplify what we find important, throw away what falls behind and further encode what we want to keep for future reference. What we keep we then push into the format of the story. IV A story considers a series of events carefully chosen from the larger context of reality.
Events just happen, often without rhyme or reason.
We struggle with this lack of sense in the events of our lives, we persist in asking why though no answer may exist. Whether or not life is a random series of events is debatable. What is important for us, however, is that we initially perceive it that way. A story turns on this crucial difference, the causality linking the events within. In a story, nothing happens by chance.