Throughout the story, Gabriel is shown to be a man detached from his Irish roots and alienated from the cultural life of Dublin. He is unable to connect with his wife whose beauty and mystery he struggles but desires to understand. On the other hand, Gabriel occupies what is depicted as a vacuous bourgeois present his emotions paralysed, his sexuality stultified. Gretta’s memory of Micheal conjures up the deep romantic past of the West of Ireland. His wife’s revelation to him of her buried passion for Micheal Furey, a boy who ‘died for her sake’, produces in Gabriel a spiritual manifestation, an epiphany.
It is here that “The Dead” unexpectedly becomes a story about a man and his marriage and about a woman and wife whom Gabriel has known so little.
Indeed, in the final pages, the Conroys (Gabriel and his wife, Gretta) leave the party at the Misses Morkans’ and retire to their hotel late at night. But it is about those things in a radically different way than you are led to think all through the story. Initially, “The Dead” appears to be about something: a group of people at a party, time passing, death.
“The Dead” is set at the Misses Morkans’ annual dance in Dublin, held around the time of the epiphany – the 6th of January – and devolves upon the spiritual epiphany of Gabriel Conroy. Many say that Joyce’s later work is the real thing, but I prefer this collection of short stories. In the minds of many it is one of the greatest works in the English language, and for me at least, it most certainly is. One of my favourite short stories is “The Dead” in James Joyce’s Dubliners. It is a story mesmerising in its beauty its recreation of reality profound.
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