"The Dead" is an intriguing story, mixing the joy of an annual Christmas party with serious reflection and several small but significant incidents that the reader eventually sees the importance. Mortality seems to be the key part of the story, beginning with its title. The story is set in winter, which is holiday season. Once we are first introduced to Gabriel Conroy at the Christmas party, most of the conversation is small talk, or short moments of family drama. For example, Aunt Kate and Julia worried about Freddy making a scene from being “screwed” which seems to be an annual occurrence year after year. There are also key moments of genuine emotion and connection between loved ones, such as Gabriel's moving speech, which brings his aunts to tears.
But the evening is interrupted by small disturbances that leave the reader captivated. The first is Gabriel's talk with Lily. Without meaning to, he patronizes the young girl, saying that “she'll be having her own wedding soon.” Lily's response: “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.” The incident disturbs Gabriel deeply, and it is the first fail attempt of communication in the story and blames his high-status education for not being able to talk to servants. Instead, he leaves her a tip symbolizing that he relies on the comfort of money.
The miscommunication continues. When he chats with Miss Ivors, he takes her light reprimanding very personally. Irish politics come up: she accuses him lightly of being less than loyal to Ireland, calling him a “West Briton,” a derogatory term for an Irishman not sufficiently committed to independence and still loyal to Great Britain. Miss Ivors’ character is actually quite appealing, apparently intelligent, well-educated, and without spite. Their conversation emphasizes that an Irish party would not be Irish without reference to Irish politics. At the end of the conversation, he feels that Miss Ivors has made a fool of him, but her grace and good spirit would seem to suggest that her intentions were innocent.
The premise of miscommunication and even isolation really comes out in full swing after the party. Gabriel spends the ride home thinking of his wife and their many happy moments together. But he soon learns that she has been thinking of a deceased love, Michael Furey, she had in her youth. Though married, they spent the ride home in completely different worlds, having the sense of isolation. He had hoped for a great night with his wife, but their night ends with Gretta sleeping and Gabriel admitting that he has never felt so strongly for a woman that he would die for her, as Michael Furey did. He becomes furious with the thought of the idea that another man loved his wife, but then a sort of sadness comes over him when he realized that he has never felt such a powerful emotion. Maybe, this is when he realizes that life is too short and the people who often live these full and happy lives are the living instead of merely walking through life as a shadow, like himself, and have the living carry your memory once you are gone.
Joyce joins the premise of isolation and mortality to tie the end of the story together. Gabriel feels himself becoming one of the deceased: “His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.” The snow, falling upon "all the living and the dead" becomes a metaphor for isolation, the inability to know others, even those with whom we are intimate. Ultimately, the story ends with the possibility that Gabriel had an epiphany and might change the way he lives his life but one can only assume he will join the dead and not be remembered.
-Lauren St Pierre
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