In the last story Joyce recalls top of the moral crisis of Gabriel Conroy. In the early twentieth century Dublin snowing hard, was not the case for years. Gabriel and his wife participate in the annual ball of the young ladies Morkan: his sister Mary Jane and hospitable aunts Kate and Julia.

With them, there are many other special guests and figures moving on the party scene. Gabriel comes across so different in personality: nationalism bigoted Mrs. Ivors to shine and cheerful demeanors of Mr. Browne and Freddie Malins, and is in charge of the great rhetorical diners, stressing the hospitable character of the Irish people and a melancholy look towards the past. The evening was dominated by songs and dancing until gradually the guests go home.

Gabriel and his wife are accompanied by other people to the carriage that will take them to their hotel. After the mirth Gabriel and his wife are now alone. Gabriel discovers the moments of joy, intimacy and tenderness with his wife in himself again, in a life time by suffering and feel a strong sensual need to love her.

Gabriel would like Gretta to return his love as soon as they are on the room. But just when they are close, his wife confesses him the reason of her sadness.

A song at the party, had reminded her of a guy she met in Galway, before she arrived in Dublin. He was so sick and in love with her to challenge his illness, being in the rain to meet her, just before she departed.

Gabriel's sense of hanger soon develops into a sense of defeat. Therefore he understands everu ideal is gone, he has failed as well as he is a mediocre human being. He becomes aware then that if you die for a passion that is better than dying of old age and time.

His soul feels in fact already died, while the snow falls wearily of Dublin, covering the living and the dead, and there is no difference between the two.

The final atmosphere in which the living and the dead seem to switch roles, in which the memory of the beloved Gretta seems to be more real than the evanescent figure of Gabriel, in fact, does not allude to yet another failure of the protagonist faced with the prospect of change: the image of the couple at the window watching the snow is both an awareness of their own inner death (for Gretta remember having made the center of his existence, for Gabriel to have believed they lived in a existential dimension solid and safe but in reality deeply fragile-consider his marriage), and as alluded to Gabriel in the end with the phrase "go west" proposed radical.

This can be implemented in physical death or escape from reality Irish, not implemented in all the other stories, stands in "The Dead" as a final solution and synthesis of the whole collection of stories.