The Dead is a short story taken from James Joyce's Dubliners. The story deals with the paralysis of the Irish culture, as the characters are standing in their reality without doing nothing. The main character is Gabriel Conroy, a young man who tries to escape from his world but is unable to. Another important character is his wife Gretta, a melancholic woman. The other characters are used to represent the various aspects of the Irish society, like Gabriel's aunts or Freddy Mallins. Therefore, they are represented with their weakness as James Joyce meant to show the human creature as what it is.
The story is made up of two sequences, used to represent the Irish society in James Joyce period and the human being. In the first sequence the story is set in Gabriel's aunts house, where the aunts are giving a Christmas party. Here it is shown the emptiness of the society, which is also paralyzed by its structure, and also Gabriel inability to take decisions In the second sequence Gabriel Conroy and his wife go to a hotel to stay the night. Gretta, by revealing the reasons of her sadness, obliges Gabriel to face the nature of their relationship and the vacuity of life.
The writer uses various narrative techniques like the stream of consciousness, the free omniscient narrator and the symbolical realism, that allows the reader to see the various aspects of Irish society. Also, uses rhetorical language to show how useless it is. Furthermore, the narrator is mental working because he adopts Gabriel eyes to see the world.