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.
