The Dead
One night around Christmas time, Gabriel Conroy, a youngish writer with gilt-framed round glasses, goes with his wife Gretta to the Christmas dance held at the home of the Misses Morkan: his aunts, Kate and Julia, and their niece, Mary Jane. A cheerful chaos reigns at the old women's house, with Lily, the caretaker's daughter, scampering about, and Gabriel's aunts worrying whether Freddy Malins will turn up drunk. A piano plays in a parlor full of dancing couples. Gabriel tells his aunts that on account of the cold, he and Gretta will be staying in a hotel nearby rather than returning home that night. Gretta laughingly confides to the old women that Gabriel has made her wear galoshes to the party and that he makes their son Tom lift dumbbells. The women laugh merrily. Freddy Malins arrives slightly drunk but not disastrously so. Gabriel goes downstairs to check on him, and Freddy heads into the parlor to talk to the gregarious Mr. Browne. The group assembles to listen to Mary Jane play a difficult piano piece, and Gabriel's mind wanders to his mother, who had opposed his marriage and described Gretta as "country cute." Gabriel remembers how Gretta nursed his mother through her long and ultimately fatal illness.
Of course, one of the things that makes "The Dead" so successful is its evocation of the party, which is its main setting. Joyce has a remarkable skill for creating loud, festive gatherings out of words, so that every detail in the cheery chaos becomes discernible. The dance, the loud, foolish exchanges in the carriage, the dinner and the cheering after Gabriel's speech, come to life here as scenes rarely come to life in fiction. In this sense, the genius of James Joyce in Dubliners is that he can show us the tragedy of the unknowability of anyone outside oneself while simultaneously giving us as complete a view as is possible into the essential character of human beings. Curiously, for a book of stories that have largely succeeded in laying bare the secret thoughts and feelings of a wide variety of people, the principal theme of "The Dead" is the inscrutability of every other person besides oneself, of the impossibility of ever truly knowing anyone. ("We cannot give ourselves," as Mr. Duffy thought in "A Painful Case," "We are our own.") The dead, obviously, are utterly unknowable; in this story, so are the living. Gretta is hopelessly severed from her dead love Michael Furey, but Gabriel is hopelessly severed from his living wife Gretta. Even after her revelation, he wonders whether she has told him the whole story, insinuating that he suspects that she and Michael Furey may have been lovers. (As he thinks this thought, Gabriel is staring at the heap of Gretta's clothes.) This theme is hinted at when Gabriel is baffled by Miss Ivors's motives; when he is unable to see into his own wife, he is truly beginning to approach the realm "where dwell the vast hosts of the dead," who flicker invisibly in his consciousness. The snow that Gabriel feels falling "through the universe" covers up all of Ireland, the houses of the living and the gravestones of the dead, obscuring names, obscuring features, obscuring every feature. Its opacity is not simply a function of weather; for Gabriel, the snow represents a deep and abiding human truth: the essential loneliness of the soul. The hour is late; the party is breaking up. Gabriel and Gretta linger, he telling a story about Patrick Morkan, his grandfather, an
Some common words found in the essay are:
Michael Furey, Miss Ivors's, Freddy Malins, Malins Browne, Gabriel Gretta, Mary Jane, Miss Ivors, Aunt Kate, Commentary Dead, Misses Morkans', michael furey, miss ivors, freddy malins, story book, snow falling, love michael furey, hopelessly severed, love michael, gabriel baffled, dead story, song lass aughrim, mary jane,
Approximate Word count = 1494
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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