James Joyce’s Dubliners betrays a narrative innovative tendency towards the restriction of point of view, which means the narration tends to unfold through the character’s point of view without omniscient interference. After examining the short stories in the context of their creation, we assert that Joyce’s exile and Dubliners’s censorship mostly account for this formal innovation. Further exploration shows that the restriction of point of view is actually a narrative strategy Joyce deploys to convey his ambiguous and ambivalent feelings towards his homeland and compatriots triggered by his exilic experience.