The Dead is a short story by Dubliners, this story is one of the most famous story in Dubliners. Central themes are mortality and isolation, but we even see the political divisions in Ireland, during the conversation between Miss Ivors and Gabriel. And also we can see the criticism to the church, when Aunt Kate speaks bitterly of the decision of Pope Pius X to exclude women from all church choirs. But the main element is Gabriel's Epiphany at the end of the story. Indeed Gabriel experiences a change that makes him examine his own life and human life in general. Gabriel, during the Epiphany, sees himself as a shadow of a person, flickering in a world in which the living and the dead meet. Though in his speech at the dinner he insisted on the division between the past of the dead and the present of the living, but Gabriel now recognizes, after hearing that Michael Furey's memory lives on, that such division is false, because as he looks out of his hotel window, he sees the falling snow, and he imagines it covering Michael Furey's grave just as it covers those people still living, as well as the entire country of Ireland.

Besides The Morkans' party represent the usual routines that make existence so lifeless in Dubliners. The events of the party repeat each year: Gabriel gives a speech, Freddy Malins arrives drunk, everyone dances the same memorized steps, everyone eats. Such tedium fixes the characters in a state of paralysis. They are unable to break from the activities that they know, so they live life without new experiences, insensitive to the world.

 Indeed In his speech, Gabriel claims to lament the present age in which hospitality like that of the Morkan family is undervalued, but at the same time he insists that people must not linger on the past, but embrace the present. His later thoughts reveal this attachment to the past when he envisions snow as "general all over Ireland." In every corner of the country, snow touches both the dead and the living, uniting them in frozen paralysis. However, Gabriel's thoughts in the final lines of Dubliners suggest that the living might in fact be able to free themselves and live unfettered by routines and the past.