The Dead is the last short story of J. Joyce's Dubliners. Right from the title, the reader can imagine who the dead  are: they are all Irish people, dead because of their paralysis. So the story presents again the theme of paralysis, that characterizes all the collection but here it is underlined more  than in the other stories.

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 the emptiness of the society is shown. Society  is also paralyzed by its structure, and   Gabriel's inability to take decisions comes to surface, too.  In the second sequence Gabriel Conroy and his wife go to a hotel to stay for the night. By revealing the reasons of her sadness, Gretta obliges Gabriel to face the nature of their relationship and the vacuity of life.

At the hotel, when Gretta confesses to Gabriel that she was thinking of her first love, he becomes furious at her and himself, realizing that he has no claim on her and will never be "master." After Gretta falls asleep, Gabriel softens. Now that he knows that another man preceded him in Gretta's life, he feels not jealousy, but sadness that Michael Furey once felt an aching love that he himself has never known. Reflecting on his own controlled, passionless life, he realizes that life is short, and those who leave the world like Michael Furey, with great passion, in fact live more fully than people like himself.

The writer uses a third person omniscient narrator, who tells the story from Gabriel's point of view. In this way the attention is focused on character subjectivity and feelings, underlining also his inner contrast and making understand the reader he is not a hero, but a real man with weakness fears. Realism presents the situation of Ireland but also the situation of every man in that period, when all the certainties disappeared. J. Joyce uses also the narrative technique of epiphany. Gabriel lives a epiphany during the second part of the novel, but it is activated in the first part, during the party, while Gretta is totally absorbed in listening the song.
Epiphany emphasizes the profoundness of Gabriel's difficult awakening that concludes the story and the collection. Gabriel experiences an inward change that makes him examine his own life and human life in general. While many characters in Dubliners suddenly stop pursuing what they desire without explanation, this story offers more specific articulation for Gabriel's actions. Gabriel 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, Gabriel now recognizes, after hearing that Michael Furey's memory lives on, that such division is false. 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. The story leaves open the possibility that Gabriel might change his attitude and embrace life, even though his somber dwelling on the darkness of Ireland closes Dubliners with morose acceptance. He will eventually join the dead and will not be remembered.