Textual and structural analysis of The Dead, from Dubliners, by James Joyce

The Dead is the closing short story of James Joyce’s Dubliners. It is the longest story in the collection, and its particular location among the others gives it a clear focus, as if James Joyce wanted it to be the natural conclusion of the analysis developed throughout the entire book.

The Dead is about a young man, Gabriel Conroy, who takes part in a party given by his two aunts, Kate and Julia, and his cousin Mary Jane, accompanied by his wife Gretta. After several events which take place during the party, most of them unpleasant, Gabriel leaves the house with his wife, and they go to sleep in a nearby hotel, where the flow of bad events reaches its climax, together with Gabriel’s realization of his own weakness and inability to live.

The story can be divided in several passages, whose change is marked by a shift in the setting. From an overall view, the reader can notice that the entire story follows an ABA scheme, where the two A indicate internal setting, and the B indicate external setting. This subdivision may be made clearer taking into consideration the alterations in Gabriel’s mood: nervous, irked and also depressed when he is inside; self confident, happy and eager outside. This structure is much more complex than the one characterizing the previous stories, where there is no change between inside and outside (for example, Ivy Day in the Committee Room is only set indoor), and the parable of characters is just presented in its descending section (a BA scheme). All this makes The Dead a lot stronger than the other stories, since it shows the crisis of the individual in a wider perspective, rather than concentrating on a single “slice of life”, as other stories do.

The story begins with a short presentation of the Morkan family, which the main characters, including Gabriel, belong to. The description introduces the reader to a normal family devoted to music and singing, and used to give a party once a year. The narrator lets the reader enter the trivial worries of the two sisters, as the fear that Freddy Malins, a friend, would come drunk; all this in order to depict a very common familiar environment, with both its good and bad aspects. Then the main character, Gabriel Conroy, is introduced as one of the guests, but the narrator does not stop to give a physical description, and there is no analysis of his personality. Rather, the narrator prefers to directly take the reader into the dialogue between him and Lily, a young maid. This choice does really reflect the modernist way to tell a story: there is no intrusive narrator, the characters’ personality and believes emerge only through their own words and actions, there is no authority that can give judgements, and the duty to deduce a meaning or a teaching out of the story is entirely in the reader’s hands. Moreover, Joyce’s decision not to dig into Gabriel’s life or opinions is intended to make him a “no one/everyone” man, a simple representative of an entire social class where personal differences can be neglected since one person tends to confound with the others, thus originating the massified middle class lacking in real values, typical of that period.

Gabriel’s discussion together with Lily gives us a first sample of the difficulty in communication that characterizes the modernist period. Their dialogue is forced from the beginning, and it is later broken when Gabriel asks her whether she has a boyfriend or not. The sudden, violent and unexpected reaction of the young maid makes Gabriel embarrassed and forces him to give her some money, pretending it is a Christmas present, and to abruptly abandon the dialogue, running away. However, it is just the beginning of a series of misunderstandings and quarrels which have their basis in the impossibility for a man or woman to communicate his/her thoughts and feelings since language is incapable of doing so: every individual is permanently trapped inside himself and he cannot correspond to others.

A good example of that is given by Gabriel’s conversation with Miss Ivors, a young nationalist lady, who gets offended founding that Gabriel is a reviewer at a pro-British newspaper. Even if there is no direct connection between being a reviewer at such a newspaper, and being a sympathizer of the British Empire, Gabriel’s struggle to convince her that he is not against Irish independence dramatically fails, as Miss Ivors, after having ill treated him for all the time, leaves the party early, for Gabriel’s great disappointment and regret.

The dialogues between the guests during dinner are very representative of the society of those years: racism, superficiality in Religious matters, limited and naïve culture come naturally to the surface through the banqueters’ words, portraying a world of false appearances and lacking in real and stable values. Gabriel’s speech at the end of the dinner is just a series of empty, rhetorical words; Gabriel is aware of that (he has made the speech only because his aunts requested him to do so), but the others seem not to notice Gabriel’s disbelief in what he says. Moreover, even if Gabriel wanted to conclude his speech with a cultured quotation from a poet, the guests take over and they intonate a trivial, stupid adapted version of For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow to the two aunts.

After the party has ended and the guests slowly start to go back home, Gabriel suddenly reacquires some happiness. During the party, he had watched several times outside the windows, looking at the snowy landscape and hoping to be there, and so when he finally gets out he is terribly excited and he starts conjecturing and remembering about his past happy life and in particular about his happy relationship with his wife Gretta, who is accompanying him. A sudden urge to have her near to him, and to possess her, grows in him, and becomes real sexual attraction when they arrive to the hotel.

The ascending parabola of the character seems to be unstoppable: his desire to live is at the maximum, and, finally, for the first time, one of Joyce’s character seems to have reached real satisfaction and accomplished the research for a meaning of life.

Unpredictably, however, Gretta shows to be very upset and preoccupied, and she also refuses her husband’s attentions: she later explains that a song, sung during the party, has reminded her of a boy, fond of music but very weak, who she met when she was young. She had fallen in love with this boy, who, desiring to see her one more time before she left for Dublin, ran under the rain to reach her house, greeting her for the last time, but getting seriously ill for that, and dying shortly after. Gretta, after this vent, stretches on the bed and then falls asleep.

Gabriel’s reaction to such a story is, first of all, a great disappointment because he cannot put into practice his intentions; then rage for a love rival, even if he is dead; finally, a strong, deep depression. He realizes he cannot say he really loves his wife, since that boy gave his life for her while they were just lovers; Gabriel feels inadequate, he believes his precedent joy and excitement were all a mistake, and he finally recognizes there is no difference between dead and alive: he and his “rival” are in the same condition, and, to reinforce that, in the final scene both the streets around the hotel and the boy’s tomb are covered by the snow.

Reaching the end, the reader can finally understand the structure of the story in all its aspects. While in the other stories random characters (schoolboys, clerks, …) are represented in a single aspect of their dramatic and senseless life, and there is no real introspective analysis, in The Dead Joyce shows from one man’s point of view all the contradictions and the falseness of a society where there is no more a centre, a unique truth, a stable set of values; the eager will to find a meaning, embedded inside human nature itself, clashes with a reality that is a stranger to the subject. Therefore men have only two choices: being crushed by the unsupportable awareness of life’s lack of sense, or living a naïve, ingenuous life falling into stereotypes and common phrases. Thus The Dead is a masterpiece representing the fall of man from the great heights where he had been put by himself, and a brave acknowledgment of our faulty, weak and pathetic existence.