SOURCE: Benstock, Bernard. “A Drama in Exile.” In James Joyce, pp. 73–93. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1985.

In the following essay, Benstock discusses the characters and their relationships in Exiles.

The outbreak of the Great War in 1914 caught the Joyces in Austrian Trieste as British nationals, yet Joyce forged ahead after a lapse in completing A Portrait and beginning the writing of Ulysses, until he was allowed to leave for neutral Switzerland a year later. He interrupted the work on Ulysses, however, to undertake a third dramatic work—and the only one to survive—the play Exiles. Throughout his life thereafter Joyce hovered protectively over his one surviving play, concerned about productions, publications, and translations. On one hand it represented a relic of his probational period as a young writer searching for a medium, writing poems, plays, and stories in his late adolescence; on the other hand it...