The Dead is the last short story of Dubliners . Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short and realistic stories, which portray the lives of ordinary people in Dublin with such attention on the details which have a symbolic meaning. According to Joyce, Dublin is the centre of paralysis created by relationship, social cultural and religious traditions or by the character's own nature.
The story is structured into three macrosequences:
- The first one is set at Kate and Julia Morkan's house in the beginning of Christmas party, which they offer every year for friends and relatives. Gabriel Conroy, the favorite nephew of the Misses Morkan and the main character, and his wife, Gretta ,are the main hosts and help receive the guests.
- The second one is the dinner. The sequence focus the attention on Irish tradition and providing elements of discussion among the characters. During the dinner, Gabriel delivers a speech, in which he praises Kate, Julia, and Mary Jane for their hospitality. Framing this quality as an Irish strength, Gabriel laments the present age in which such hospitality is undervalued. Nevertheless, he insists, people must not linger on the past and the dead, but live and rejoice in the present with the living.
- The last sequence focuses the attention on Gabriel's epiphany. While Gabriel and his wife is leaving the house, Gabriel notes a change on his wife's behavior, when started the Irish song "The Lass of Aughrim". Gretta reveals to him that the song upset her, because it reminds her of a boy from her past, Michael Furey. He was her fist love and he had died for her when he was only seventeen years old.
The main characters of the story are:
- Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist, an intellectual, who at the beginning looks proud of himself, pleased with his superiority over others, eager to excel and to have in its possession, especially his wife. Gabriel becomes an exponent of those Dubliners, who live in situations of failure and frustration. It is clearly visible while he is dancing with Miss Ivors: Gabriel suffers from her a barrage of questions about her sarcastic and derisive nationalist sympathies, which he cannot answer adequately. Unable to develop an exemplary response, Gabriel exclaims, arguing that he is sick of his country, losing control and leaving the astonished Miss Ivors.
The sense of frustration it was noted, also, while Gabriel obsessively and repeatedly passes on a note the most important points of the traditional speech that he has to say at the end of the dinner. Gabriel's restlessness violently culminating in his tormented night in hotel with Gretta, his wife. His final meeting with her leads him to reflect on their paralysed vision of the world. When he sees Gretta transfixed and transfigured by the music at the end of the party, he longs to be in control of his wife's thoughts.
At the hotel, when his wife tells him that she was thinking about her first love, Gabriel becomes furious, thought to have played a miserable part in the lives of his wife, as if he had never been her husband. He isn't jealous. But, he is sad because of that Michael Furey once lived a tormented love that he has never known. Reflecting on his life controlled, without passion, Gabriel realizes that life is short, and those who leave the world as Michael Furey, in fact they are more alive in the people "paralyzed" like him.
So it is an epiphany about dead because his existence seems to fade, as the relationship with Gretta. He cannot relieve himself the thought that his life and the evening party, had been among the dead. At the end of the story, Gabriel looks out the window of the hotel room, he sees the snow falling, and imagine that it is covering the grave of Michael Furey, as well as covering all the people still living, as well as the entire country of Ireland. In every part of Ireland, the snow is touching the living and the dead, uniting them in a cold paralysis.
- Gretta Conroy is Gabriel's wife. For most of the story Gretta is a secondary character, because she gives the reader the feeling of living relationships with other characters in a detached way, as if she lived in a world all her own, generated by thoughts and memories that make her almost a shadow. But she gets the absolutely centrality when it creates in her a profound personal epiphany, sprung from the song "The Lass of Aughrim". In the revelation of young love made to her husband, Gretta is discovered, in the eyes of the reader, unhealthily tied to that secret. So, also Gretta is paralyzed character, because she is linked to her memory, to the past.
- The Miss Morkans, the older sisters Kate and Julia and their orphaned niece Mary Jane, are the promoter of the Christmas festival that annually takes place in their home. Their role is primarily to avoid problems such as religious and political differences that may erupt among the guests at the party. The Miss Morkans are paralyzed characters, because the annual party, that get at their house, seems to consist of routines that make the existence monotone.
Joyce adopts symbolic realism in the narration of the story. Symbolic realism is the result of impersonality. Indeed the narrator is eclipsed in characters' dialogues and thoughts.
Joyce provides realistic description of Irish life and symbols convey hidden meanings. Symbolism appears in various forms by means of the use of language.
For examples characters names have a symbolic meaning: both Gabriel and Michael are Archangels. The name Gabriel means "God's able-bodied one; hero of God". Gabriel is the angel of annunciation and the reminds to hope of rebirth. Instead, the name Michael means "who resemble God?". He was the archangel who defeats the dragon. So he is the avaging angel representing remorse.
Another important symbol is the music. music becomes the decisive event of the story when Aunt Kate sings the song which, to Gabriel, sounds like an anticipation of her death and when Gabriel sees his wife listening to "The Lass of Aughrim". It is from that moment that Gabriel's epiphany starts.
In conclusion another important symbol is the snow. It symbolizes:
- Gabriel's wish to escape from the situation in which he is compelled to be.
- The certainty of the rebirth of nature
- The peace that will follow after our lives come to an end: death and peace at the same time.