The Dead, James Joyce - Vincent P. Pecora (essay date 1986)
Vincent P. Pecora (essay date 1986)
SOURCE: "'The Dead' and the Generosity of the Word," in PMLA, Vol. 101, No. 2, March, 1986, pp. 233-45.
[In the following essay, Pecora approaches the question of whether Gabriel acquires a level of self-understanding at the close of "The Dead," maintaining that Gabriel "in no way overcomes or transcends the conditions of his existence."]
Headed toward death, language turns back upon itself; it encounters something like a mirror; and to stop this death which would stop it, it possesses but a single power: that of giving birth to its own image in a play of mirrors that has no limits.
Michel Foucault, "Language to Infinity"
James Joyce's story is opened by a "caretaker's daughter"; filled with the physically aging, the psychologically repressed, and the emotionally arrested; and closed in a flurry of bewildered sensation and "confused adoration" that recalls in one...
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