In the modern age(that covers a period of time that goes from about 1890 to 1930)competition for raw materials created a break from the previous period of positivism owed to Puritanism, Utilitarism, Darwinism and scientific discoveries, in which information came from the sensory experience. The first World War in 1914 made many lose their faith in the principles of capitalism, liberal democracy and the Victorian idea of progress: Economic depression during the end of the 19^th century demonstrated that the principle of “laissez – faire” wouldn’t necessarly produce benefits. Darwinism, based on the Theory of Natural Selection, asserted that God had not created the human race, so Victorians were afraid to live without God, a point of reference: there was a crisis of values from the religious, economic and political point of view. For this reason many felt that the religious code could no longer be valid: the only point of reference was himself and the human being was in continuous search for(quest) his/her identity, truth and meaning. In the end of the 19^th century, therefore studies of linguistics became more intense: linguistics became useful(for man)to search for(his) identity, because studying the way man spoke became useful to understand better the relationship between man and reality. On one side, modernism emphasized more on an art’s ability to affect the mind: from the artistic point of view the reader previously could recognize a movement thanks to a “representational” form of art and now the artistic production moved to  the attention for the sensory experience, in which paintings were the result of the sensations stimulated by the scenes. The final form of this process of transformation was an attention for form and the pure elements of color. Parallel, narrative techniques evolved: there was a shift(in the same way) from a narrative representation to narrative techniques that underlined an attention on form. This aspect was also the consequence of an intensification of the study of linguistics: Ferdinand de Saussure, for example, elaborated the concept of synchronic language; meaning is constructed through binary pairs and the link between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. On later development of linguistics studies, Jacques Derrida moved on from Saussure’s ideas holding that there was no link between the signifier and the signified, meaning is simply the result of deconstruction and construction. So the authorial position of the narrator disappeared: is the reader who has to find his/her own meaning. An example of this process of transformation of the narrative techniques is provided by the text “The Dubliners” written by James Joyce. In particular, the last chapter of the collection of stories, “The Dead”, represents a significative example of the use of narrative techniques. “The Dubliners” is the result of a collection of short stories that presented the city of Dublin during the 19^th century, in the period of the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps “The Dead” is a longer story that assumed the form of a more narrative story than the others and presented an omniscient narrator that told the events focusing on the characters’ dialogue and the topic of the dead. The dead represented an example of the attention to form and founded a multiple level of interpretation: it might be inner-death of the protagonists living without points of reference(he doesn’t trust himself), the story might represent death also from the linguistic point of view: the death of the previous forms of narratives and the substation with new narrative techniques that could highlight the attention for form maintaining a narrative feature.