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Blog 2: "The Dead"


James Joyce’s final short story in Dubliners is “The Dead.” “The Dead” shows many different characters of different social standings. Gabriel, the main character of the story, comes from a higher class along with his wife and his aunts. Throughout “The Dead,” Gabriel hides behind his social class and uses it to maintain a certain sense of comfort during the dinner party at his aunts’ home. The story is also set during the Winter, and a time when it is snowing which is uncharacteristic for Dublin. This correlates with the unusual circumstances that surround the story when Gabriel, a man usually so comfortable with the monotony and familiarity of his life, questions everything.
The dinner party is clearly something that Gabriel’s aunts look forward to every year, and it is shown that during these dinner parties the aunts are able to show their higher social class. Lily, a servant in Gabriel’s aunt’s household, is clearly from a lower class than Gabriel and the rest of the guests at the dinner party because she is a servant rather than being invited to the party. Gabriel makes this division when he awkwardly asks her about her love life and then heavily tips her when she awkwardly rebuffs the question. Because he was put in an uncomfortable position, he used his money to try and assuage the situation. The distance in social classes makes their encounter awkward because neither is used to interacting with the other in a social setting. Gabriel then struggles internally with the speech he is planning on giving before dinner, thinking that some people might not be able to understand it because he views himself as more intelligent than they: “He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning, for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers” (Joyce 121). Most of the short story has an aura of detachment and haughtiness. Gabriel thinks himself to be above the rest of the people at the dinner party because he understands a reference that they most likely will not. Because the dinner party is an annual affair, it can be inferred that the events of the party merely repeat themselves each year. This goes along with the overall theme of Dubliners: the monotony and dullness that the citizens of Dublin face. Each year Gabriel and his wife go to the dinner party and each year they most likely encounter the same few people. Gabriel’s detachment from the world and from those of a lower social class is merely a byproduct of the Dubliner way of life. The monotony of the holiday, something that happens from year to year, further intensifies Gabriel’s rather miserable outlook on life.
Towards the end of the short story, however, he realizes many things that he did not realize before. His wife’s confession about a former lover, Michael Furey, who died in an attempt to see her one last time, leaves him feeling very uneasy. This is most likely because he has lived his life so dethatched from his true feelings that when confronted with the deepest secrets of his wife he does not know how to respond, similarly in the way that he did not know how to respond to Lily’s back-talk about her love life. He realizes the small space that he has occupied in wife’s life, for she had a former more passionate love that has engulfed much of her thoughts for many years: “It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life” (Joyce 151).  He acknowledges the life of Michael Furey, who died in a “passionate” way even though he died much too young. Gabriel thinks that maybe it is better to die in such a passionate way rather than live a monotonous life. This further contributes to the unusual circumstances of the story because Gabriel had been married to his wife for some years and had never known this story of her former lover. He then confronts several things in his own life, and it is clear that this is uncharacteristic of Gabriel because he usually lives so detached. The ending of the short story leaves readers feeling both hopeful and perhaps a little gloomy. Gabriel’s closing thoughts have to do with those who had died, namely Michael Furey. He acknowledges that the snow falling in Dublin not only falls on the living, but on the dead buried there as well. Gabriel’s new outlook on life, to live more freely, is hopeful, but his statement that the snow falls on the living and the dead shows that even in death it is hard to escape the usual monotony of life.

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