By general consensus, this is the greatest of all the stories in Dubliners—the longest, richest, and most emotionally affecting—and the story more than any other that points toward Joyce’s career as one of the English language’s greatest novelists ever. (He would follow this book with A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.)
The story reiterates the great themes of Dubliners. Gabriel’s marriage is clearly suffering from paralysis, the condition of nearly all the characters in the collection. This accounts for his excitement at story’s end when he believes that Gretta’s passion relates to him and them, as their marriage has decayed badly over the years. In this story, paralysis is represented as usual by the colors yellow and brown, but Joyce also employs the symbolism of snow and ice; after all, if something is frozen, it is motionless—paralyzed.
Thus, when Gabriel enters his aunts’ party, “A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toecaps on the toes of his galoshes; and, as the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-stiffened frieze, a cold fragrant air from out-of-doors escaped from crevices and folds.” The symbolism returns at story’s end, in the justly famous final paragraphs describing a snow-covered Ireland. Not only Gabriel but his entire homeland has been paralyzed, Joyce is saying (or, more precisely, revealing). Alternatively, at the conclusion of Dubliners, something connects Gabriel to his fellow Irishmen, a connection he had until that time disavowed.
Gabriel’s paralysis is partly a result of his denial of and lack of interest in those fellow Irishmen, dramatized in his encounter with Miss Ivors. Like Kathleen Kearny in “A Mother,” she is involved in the movement to restore Irish language and culture to the island. Gabriel writes a column for a newspaper opposed to Irish nationalism; indeed, he goes so far as to tell Miss Ivors, “Irish is not my language.” Additionally, he tells her that he is uninterested in a vacation to the west of Ireland, preferring to holiday in Europe. She parries by calling him a West Briton—that is, an Irishman who identifies primarily with England, a cultural traitor—and this appears to be at least partly true.
After all, Gabriel plans to quote in his after-dinner speech from the work of the poet Robert Browning (an Englishman); when he finally delivers that speech, it includes extemporaneous remarks criticizing the “new generation” of Miss Ivors and her associates. Gabriel wears galoshes, fashionable in Europe, though more or less unheard of in Ireland. He earned his college degree at Anglican Trinity College in Dublin. When he thinks of going outside, what comes to mind is the snow-covered monument to Wellington, a British hero who played down his birth in Ireland. And speaking of monuments, another symbol of Ireland’s inability to progress is Gabriel’s grandfather riding his horse Johnny around and around the statue of William III, conqueror of Ireland on behalf of England. (The circle as symbol of pointless repetition was introduced in the stories “After the Race” and “Two Gallants.”) Thus, as in many Dubliners stories before it, “The Dead” connects paralysis with the English. To summarize, Gabriel suffers from paralysis, at least partly because of his admiration for and attraction to things English.
Of course, Joyce also holds the Catholic Church accountable for Ireland’s failure to move forward into modernity. Thus, in one of the story’s most striking images (that of Trappist monks sleeping in their coffins, which is a myth, but that does not make it any less effective a symbol), Joyce portrays the most pious of clergymen as no less than the living dead, zombies among us.
Though “The Dead” includes much believable dialogue, it is the story in all of Dubliners with the most—and the most evocative—descriptions. For example, Joyce uses closely observed details to add to the reader’s understanding of the story’s characters, as in this description of Freddy Malins: “His face was fleshy and pallid, touched with color only at the thick hanging lobes of his ears and at the wide wings of his nose.” Not once but twice Freddy is described as “rubbing the knuckles of his left fist backwards and forwards into his left eye.” As a result he is easily visualized, and despite Freddy’s movement in and out of the Morkin sisters’ party, the reader never quite loses track of him.
Joyce also uses description for pacing; the author cinematically cuts away to the ordinary objects within the room during the story’s enormously dramatic penultimate scene. The result is that the already considerable dramatic tension of “The Dead” actually increases: “A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side.”
As effective as the combination of theme, symbolism, dialogue, and description were in the prior story, “Grace,” they mix here to yield something even more impressive: a story that begins simply, builds slowly, eventually grows hypnotic in its power, and ends in a truly heartrending burst of emotion. “One by one they were all becoming shades,” Gabriel thinks of the people he knows and, until now, has taken for granted. “Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”
“The Dead” is unforgettable, and it launches the reader from this collection of carefully wrought and closely joined stories (the world of Dubliners) into the world of Joyce’s remarkable novels.
