In the last few pages of the short story The Dead, the narrator, as he has been doing since the beginning of the story, focuses his attention on Gabriel's character.
His epiphany starts when Gretta falls asleep. The first argument is the isolated position of the sentence "she was fast asleep". It conveys to the reader a sense of loneliness and esclusion that is exactly how Gabriel feels. He feels lonely, far away from her wife, far away from everybody, from everyone who thinks he's a successfull man; but he's not. Gabriel is scared, is selfish and he has never made the wright decision. Even this time while he's starring at his wife he realizes that they've never really been togheter. It looks like "they had never lived together as man and wife". They seem happy together, they seem... The theme of apparence is also underlined by the detailed description the narrator does in the first few lines " looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath" making the reader feels as if he were there.
Gabriel is frustrated, unsecure, he knows that he'll never be able to compete with Michael. His emotions are well reflected by the room: " A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side". The room is a caos as well as Gabriel's soul.
At this point the narrator gives the reader a break and starts writing about few hours ago at Gabriel aunts' house and Gabriel's reflection on death, something that no one can chenge and everyone has to face, sooner or later. Thiss breef interruption is just an expedient to make the reader more interested and so to keep his attention.
The last page is dedicated to Gabriel's thoughts and feelings concerning him self, his inside part, his unconscious and his identity. He has never fallen in love in this way but now he realizes that he has always been dead more than Michael who is really dead. People on earth can be dead and dead people can live in memories. As a matter of fact, by a linguistic and semanthic point of viem, the narrator associated to Michael all the words that remind to the semanthic field of life ( solid, lived,...) wether he associated to Gabriel all the words that remind to the semanthic field of sofference, pain and death ( darkness, tears,...).
Gabriel is able to realize all this because he's conscious "He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence". However as all the characters in Dubliners, he's paralyzed, he's not able to act. The paralysis is confirmed by the setting. The  white snow, so delicate and soft, that covers and freezes everything, streets, trees, houses, people dead and alive. It covers all over the places without making distinction and uniforming our eternal and universal condition of human beings.