The Dead of Dubliners

James Joyce’s collection of short stories, Dubliners, is about just that: the citizens of Dublin, Ireland during the turn-of-the-century. It looks inside the culture of that time and place in order to investigate the deep flaws in the condition of its citizens. One of Joyce’s main themes is the intersection between life and death, and the paralysis of the living which synthesizes the two. In the closing story of the collection, called “The Dead,” this theme is demonstrated as it recounts the story of an array of Dubliners at a party. It focuses on the character of Gabriel Conroy, who, after the party retreats to his hotel where he has an inner revelation about life and death.

Joyce presents the idea of a kind of “living dead” throughout Dubliners. In “The Dead,” this theme is expressed first through the setting: an annual party at the Morkan house, where every turn of the evening is also annual—it is the same routine each time. The same characters show up in the same attitudes, they do the same things and have the same discussions.

The one moment of fire that occurs in “The Dead” is near the end, when Gabriel sees his wife’s eyes alight and her face blush, which in turn arouses in him a frenzy of desire and reminiscence, of their early days of marriage “before the years of their dull existence together”(186). As it turns out, however, the one subtle expression that injected life into Gabriel was caused by thoughts of a dead lover of his wife’s from her past. Gabriel thinks, “he had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love”(194). Gabriel here admits that he has never loved his wife, that their marriage has essentially been a routine. He only learns this once he hears this anecdote about the true, intense love which his wife felt for this boy who is dead. It is in that irony that Joyce’s theme animates.

The symbol of snow in “The Dead” also serves as a manifestation of the cold, frigid state of this society. When Gabriel first arrives at the party, “a light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat”(153). Then, when he is asked about the snow in the next scene, he replies, “I think we’re in for a night of it” (154). These moments when snow is mentioned both emphasizes the veil of death covering all of them, and that they are in for a night of paralyzing, lifeless routine. It foreshadows the end of the story, when Gabriel reflects on the idea of the snow covering all of Ireland. He realizes that this numbness is common to all of them.

While Gabriel states in his speech that they must not linger in the mourning of the dead, that “were we to brood upon them always we could not find the heart to go on bravely with our work among the living,” this sentiment becomes tragically ironic by the end, when Gabriel learns just how much the living and the dead are one and the same.