Dublin; the city of the dead and the living

James Joyce explores the coexistence of the living and the dead in “The Dead,” one of the short stories that compiles his collection Dubliners. The story is centered around Gabriel Conroy, an anxious man fatigued from his life in Ireland. Gabriel and his wife Gretta attends the annual Christmas party hosted by Kate and Julia Morkan sisters and their niece Mary Jane Morkan. Through multiple encounters and incidents that occur during the night of the event, Gabriel comes to the conclusion that the world he lives in is where the living and the dead intersect and coexist, as the dead constantly influences the living; the epiphany of the night.

After arriving at the house of the Morkan sisters and conversing with a few of other characters at the party (and unintentionally offending Lily the housemaid greatly and attempting to make it up to her by giving her a generous tip), Gabriel is paired up to dance with Miss Ivors, a super patriotic Ireland enthusiast, whilst Mary Jane plays piano. When Gabriel denies Miss Ivors’s offer to visit the Aran Isles, where the old Irish customs are preserved, Miss Ivors is greatly offended and accuses him of being unpatriotic and uninterested in his own roots. Gabriel then exclaims that he is indeed sick of Ireland.

Everything that happens in Ireland seems to be a dead, or at least dying routine for Gabriel. Like the horse that keeps on walking around in circle from the old story Gabriel recollects, everything in Ireland keeps repeating itself - the annual dinner parties alone proves to be a routine every year, with music, dancing, always-drunk Freddy Malins, and Gabriel’s speech at the dinner table. And what is dead of a routine proves to be toxic for Gabriel. Slowly but surely, the mundane routines paralyzes him and leaves him terribly depressed. 

During his speech at the dinner table, Gabriel urges the crowd to move on from the past, dwell in the present, and engage in the business of living. However, ironically, Gabriel ends the speech by praising the dying custom of old-fashion proper hospitality provided by the Morkan sisters, as James Joyce seeks to allude to readers that the dead and the living are undeniably inseparable and that Gabriel will eventually come to the epiphanic realization. 

The story Gretta tells of Michael Furey makes Gabriel realize that the world is in fact influenced by the dead. Michael Furey, who Gretta remembers after listing to Bartell D’Arcy sing, is a sickly former lover of Gretta. He dies after bidding goodbye to Gretta, the woman he passionately loves, in a pouring rain. Overwhelmed by the memory, she falls asleep crying after telling Gabriel the whole story.

Although Gabriel gets angry at first after learning about his wife’s love life before him, he eventually calms down and realizes that the dead still influences the world around him. Although Michael Furey is dead, the memories of him still haunts Gretta - the living can not escape from the dead. Gabriel ponders on the gloomy state of Dublin, Ireland, haunted by the ghosts and the memories of the dead; appropriately titled “The Dead,” turns out to be a melancholy tale after all. Who could have guessed.