He is disconnected from the people around him. "Gabriel hardly heard what she said" sums up his state. He looks out the window of the Morkans' drawing room and thinks "How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along the river and then through the park!" He is even cut off from the sensual pleasures offered by this celebratory holiday gathering. He foregoes sweets for dessert, eating a stick of celery instead — an insult, probably, to his Aunt Julia, who made the pudding. In short, he lacks the emotional intelligence of the protagonist of "The Sisters," and it is this very lack that will lead to his painful downfall at the climax of the story.
Educated and even refined, Gabriel nevertheless lacks true sensitivity. Though his blood relationship to the musical Morkan sisters and his marriage to the deeply passionate Gretta indicate that he might once have been finely attuned to the nuances of the world around him, Gabriel seems to have buried his emotions beneath a snow-like blanket of propriety. "She tried to make him ridiculous before people," he thinks resentfully of Miss Ivors, "heckling him and staring at him with her rabbit's eyes." He seems to have been a seeker once, a quester like the protagonists of "An Encounter" and "Araby." But Gabriel appears during the time at which "The Dead" takes place to have quieted the unsettled part of himself for the sake of comfort, safety, and status: "He . . . liked nothing better than to find himself at the head of a well-laden table." Later, Gabriel refers to "what vulgar people call stuffing." Appearances mean a great deal to him — more, perhaps, than what lies behind facades, the heart of things. His embarrassment (resentment, even) over the humble situation of his grandfather is striking.
