The play is set in the Dublin of 1912 and the plot revolves around the character of Richard Rowan and his intellectual dilemmas as to whether he should settle down in Ireland as a lecturer in Romance Languages or flee the nest as Joyce himself did. There is a fear that if he decides to stay it will leave him in a state of paralysis and bitterness and at the play's end we do not find a resolution only a deep longing for love and understanding on the part of Bertha Richard's wife and a deep weariness on the part of Richard himself. Exiles features many of the themes that pop up repeatedly in Joyce's work but unlike A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man and Ulysses (between which Exiles was produced) never managed to attain the same status of success as Joyce's novels.