James Joyce – Dubliners

The Dead

The text that I have to analyze is The Dead and it  belongs to the novel Dubliners, written in 1914 by James Joyce.

Dubliners is a collection of fifteen indipendent short stories, which represent Dublin and the Dubliners of the early years of the 20^th century; they are portrayed in every day’s life and the fifteen stories may be organized into four parts: the first one contains the first three short stories (The Sisters, An Encounter, Araby), which are narrated by a first person narrator and which tell about childhood; the second one contains the following four short stories (Eveline, After the Race, Two Gallants, The Boarding House), which are narrated by a third person narrator and which tell about adolescence; the third one contains the following four short stories (A Little Cloud, Counterparts, Clay, A Painful Case), which are narrated by a third person narrator and which tell about adulthood; the last one contains the following three stories (Day in the Committee Room, A Mother, Grace), which are narrated by a third person narrator, they tell about public life and are linked to the last chapter: The Dead, that tells about the death, as the title suggests. It seems as if Dublin is considered as a character because it is described from childhood to death.

The Dead is the last stories of the novel and it starts with the annual dance and dinner party organized by Julia and Kate Morgan with the help of their niece Mary Jane and of their housemaid Lily. Kate and Julia are waiting for his favourite nephew’s coming: Gabriel Conroy. Gabriel always comes with his wife Gretta and his aunts give him important tasks: for example to control the drunkard Freddy Malins, to slice the goose or to deliver a speech. Afterwards the party goes on with a piano performance by Mary Jane, Gabriel dances with Miss Molly Ivors that states that he is a West Briton because he writes literary reviews for a conservative newspaper: the Daily Express, the dinner and at the end, when guests start to go home Gabriel tells a story about his grandfather’s horse that always ran in circle. Meanwhile Gretta listens to the lyric sung by Mr. Bartell D’Arcy: The Lass of Aughrim and she becomes nostalgic. Afterwards she goes to the hotel with his husband and Gabriel, who has understood that she is sad, asks her the reason. Gretta states that the song reminds her the figure of Michael Furey, a young boy who is very important for her and who died. She cries and at the end she falls asleep; meanwhile Gabriel thinks about his wife’s past, the far love between Michael and his wife, the living, the dead. Although Michael were died, Gabriel thinks that he is more alive than himself and the story ends with Gabriel who sees the snow that covers both the living and the dead, also Michael’s grave. It seems as if his feelings are expressed by the weather: both are freeze.

Considering the structure of the text an intelligent reader can notice that it is built upon situations which are lived by the main character: Gabriel. Indeed every event contributes to characterize the figure of Gabriel Conroy and allows him to better understand himself: from the conversation with Lily to the discover of Gretta’s secret love, from the discussion with Miss Ivors to his speech during the dinner. From these situations the reader can understand that Gabriel is a proud highbrow; for example during his speech he quotes the story of Paris. Besides he wants to be better than the other, to dominate his wife and would go far from Dublin; it seems as if Gabriel is the image of what Joyce would have been become, if he had been stayed in Dublin. Moreover he is a man who personifies some features of postmodernism; indeed he is an uncertain person because he does not know how to converse with the other people and he usually speaks thanks to quotations from Greek myth to English literature. To conclude it is important to notice that his name is the same of the archangel and it contributes to create a religious background together with the name of Lily and with the day in that the story is set: probably the 6^th of January. The first one reminds the idea of lily: the archangel’s emblem, while the second one reminds the idea of the Christian Epiphany.

It is important to remember that Joyce uses the term Epiphany to represent a short moment in that a character becomes aware of himself and of his life: when Gabriel discovers his wife’s past. The epiphany is what allows Gabriel to overcome from paralysis, that is to say from his condition of passive person. Indeed he starts thinking about life and death, past and present; so he made a reflection thorough binary pairs and understand that present and past are strictly linked because you can keep an important past event thanks to your mind.

Finally the theme of paralysis is particularly described within the text, indeed all the Dubliners seem to be in a condition of paralysis: Kate and Julia organize the party every year, Freddy Malins is always drunk, Gabriel slices the goose; the hypothesis is also confirmed by the story of his grandfather’s horse because the horse always ran in circle as well as Dubliners always make the same activities.