The Dead (1916)
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
‘The Dead’ is the last and most famous of the short stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914). It concerns Gabriel Conroy, an Irish college teacher. Gabriel and
his wife Gretta spend the evening at his elderly aunts’ Christmas dance, a rather moribund affair; one incident after another makes Gabriel feel more and more a social failure. Seeing his wife look radiant after hearing an old song, he takes her home in a romantic mood. She tells him the song reminded her of a boy called Michael Furey, who was once in love with her, but who died when he was seventeen. In a famous last paragraph, Joyce describes Gabriel looking at the snow and thinking of his aunts who will soon be dead, of himself who is spiritually almost dead, and of his wife’s dead lover.
Few passages in Joyce reveal this ambivalent relation to Ireland with greater poetry than the closing paragraphs of 'The Dead.' The sense of a country trapped between Anglicized modernity and a romanticized Celtic past, an Ireland both colony and backwater, is painfully conveyed through the distress of central protagonist Gabriel Conroy.
Having catastrophically discovered in the wee small hours that his Galway-born wife, Gretta, actually reserves her tenderest emotions for the memory of doe-eyed Michael furey, a "delicate" local boy she courted in her youth but who died at seventeen, Gabriel, a successful writer, "modern man" and loving husband, is shaken. If, the story asks, Gabriel has never properly known his wife, a child of the west, how can he know himself? And how can modern Ireland, which he as a sophisticated "West Brit" typifies, reconcile itself with its ancient, but atavistic traditions?
Dismayed, Gabriel imagines himself ridiculous, inauthentic and possibly, like many characters here, spiritually paralyzed. But the image of snow, "general all over Ireland," provides as ambiguous finale for the tale. Entering a "grey impalpable world," Joyce writes, Gabriel "watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westard." Will his voyage mean chilly death or Celtic rebirth? Or neither? As ever in Dubliners, Joyce reserves judgement and the future remains profoundly uncertain.
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