The Dead Themes

The main themes in "The Dead" include frustration, disappointment, and self-discovery.

  • Frustration: Gabriel is frustrated by his choice to remain in Dublin and work there.
  • Disappointment: Gabriel is disappointed by his wife's memories of her past lover.
  • Self-Discovery: Gabriel learns important lessons about himself and his country through his interactions with his wife and her family.

Paralysis

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When Joyce discussed the motivation behind his work Dubliners, he remarked that Dublin appeared to him as the center of paralysis. By paralysis, Joyce meant the inability to act, progress, or grow emotionally and spiritually—the incapacity to fully experience life. In ‘‘The Dead,’’ Gabriel is hindered by his self-awareness. He becomes overly sensitive to Lily's cynical remarks about marriage and is uncertain about what to say in his after-dinner speech. When Miss Ivors accuses him of being loyal to the British, he avoids confronting her. He holds back from making a ‘‘grandiose phrase’’ in a room full of people. He fantasizes about using his speech to criticize Miss Ivors, but by the time he delivers it, she has already left, and his words end up simply pleasing the audience.

The anecdote Gabriel shares about Patrick Morkan's horse endlessly circling the statue of King William III symbolizes Ireland's spiritual stagnation, and Gabriel reveals his own paralysis as he paces in a circle while telling it. Finally, as he and Gretta walk down the street to find a cab, he envisions making various romantic gestures toward her but ultimately does none of them.

Provincial Culture vs. European Culture

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The setting of "The Dead" aligns with a period of Irish cultural revival, characterized by a strong interest in revitalizing Irish music, art, and language. In the story, Molly Ivors embodies this movement. She adorns herself with an Irish brooch and advocates for learning the Irish language. During the gathering, guests engage in conversations about the talents of both past and present tenors, discussing their Irish or European origins. Gabriel expresses an appreciation for traveling to Europe and acquiring European languages. Joyce himself favored embracing European culture and distanced himself from the strictly provincial views held by many of his contemporaries. Gabriel admits to Molly that Irish is not his language—reflecting the reality that many individuals of that time neither knew nor spoke Irish fluently, opting instead for English.

British Rule vs. Irish Nationalism

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For a significant portion of its history, Ireland was governed by Britain, and the conflict between the desire for independence and loyalty to Britain is a key theme in "The Dead." One instance of this tension is when Molly Ivors questions Gabriel about his contributions to the Daily Express, a publication that endorses British governance. Traditionally, supporters of Irish independence were Catholic, whereas those who favored British allegiance were Protestant. Gabriel's family is Catholic. Some scholars propose that Mr. Browne, a Protestant, symbolizes British authority due to his general unpopularity and domineering nature. Aunt Kate's comment, ‘‘Browne is everywhere,’’ reflects the all-encompassing presence of British influence in Ireland.

Death and the Dead

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The deceased hold a pivotal place in "The Dead." Gabriel honors them in his after-dinner speech, and several departed figures are mentioned throughout the story: Ellen (Gabriel's mother), Pat Morkan (his uncle), Patrick Morkan (his grandfather), and Michael Furey. Michael Furey, in particular, leads Gabriel to a greater self-understanding. When Gretta recounts Michael's affection for her, Gabriel comes to grasp that death is an unavoidable aspect of life for everyone he knows, himself included. This insight motivates him to embrace life actively rather than passively. Another reminder of mortality surfaces during a dinner discussion about a monastery where monks rest in coffins. The "dead" in the title signifies not only those who have physically died but also those who are alive yet not truly living, spiritually lifeless.

Self-Realization

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In much of "The Dead," Gabriel is depicted as self-absorbed, primarily focused on how others see him rather than considering their emotions. For instance, when Lily angrily comments that all young men are "palaver and what they can get out of you," Gabriel feels he has blundered in his interaction with her. Instead of offering an apology, he condescendingly gives her money, referring to it as a Christmas gift. As the story progresses, when Gretta shares her past involvement with Michael Furey, Gabriel undergoes a sudden moment of self-reflection, prompting him to reassess his relationship with his wife and those around him.

Autobiographical Elements

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“The Dead” is the most obviously autobiographical story in the Dubliners (1914) collection in that Joyce offers through the character of Gabriel Conroy a speculation concerning the sort of person Joyce himself might have become had he chosen to build a career for himself in Ireland. Gabriel is a vain and frustrated man who can find no genuine joy or pleasure in a nation that can look only to its past and constantly cherish, as Gabriel proclaims in his after-dinner speech, “the memory of those dead and gone great ones.” Can a nation so obsessed with its past look forward to a promising future?

There can be no doubt that the source of this story is autobiographical. Richard Ellmann devotes chapter 15 of his biography James Joyce (1959) to the genesis of “The Dead.” As a young girl in Galway in 1903, Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle, had been courted by Michael (“Sonny”) Bodkin, who suffered from tuberculosis. When Nora decided to leave Galway for Dublin, Sonny Bodkin left his sickbed in rainy weather to bid her farewell and to sing to her. After Nora arrived in Dublin, she heard that the boy had died. Knowledge of this courtship nettled Joyce, a jealous man by nature. The courtship letter that Gabriel quotes in the story is nearly a verbatim transcription of a letter that Joyce wrote to his wife, Nora, in 1904.

Ellmann offers an impressive list of biographical detail to support his point further. Every year, the Joyce family would gather for a Christmas party at No. 15 Usher’s Island, where the writer’s great aunts lived—Mrs. Lyons, Mrs. Callanan, and her daughter, Mary Ellen. According to Stanislaus Joyce, the writer’s brother, their father would perform the annual ritual of carving the goose, as Gabriel does in the story, and would address the dinner guests in the same florid style that Gabriel affects after dinner.

Like Gabriel, Joyce wrote book reviews for The Daily Express. Gabriel shares Joyce’s own disdain for west country provinciality and for the Gaelic League, represented by Miss Molly Ivors in the story. He shares Joyce’s frustration over having to compete with a dead man, idealized in his wife’s romantic memory, for his wife’s love and affection (though one suspects that this dilemma, heightened in actuality by the writer’s jealousy, was exaggerated in the story so that the futility of the dilemma would be more effectively dramatized).

Jealousy and Intellectual Pride

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Gabriel’s ego is bruised and his cultured self-image of superiority undercut when he learns that Michael Furey was employed by the “gasworks,” forcing on him the realization that there is no necessary connection between a man’s employment and his sensitivity. The man of learning may not in all respects be superior to the man of feeling.

The major themes of the story, then, are jealousy and intellectual pride, both major sins in Roman Catholic theology, and both of these sins attach to the character of Gabriel, who is as callow and unfeeling, as insecure and insensitive in his own way as Stephen Dedalus seems to be in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The theme of escape is understated in the story but insinuates itself into the basic fabric of Gabriel’s character. Gabriel’s frustration is shaped and exacerbated by his career decision to remain in Dublin and work there. His interests obviously tend elsewhere—toward England and the Continent. However, the story suggests that he can still learn important lessons through the intelligent exploration of native Irish culture and that he has been out of touch with the natural virtue and goodness that Michael Furey represents to his wife and with the instinctual understanding that makes his wife superior to him. Gabriel learns an existential moral lesson through his revelation and humiliation.

Cultural and National Identity

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“The Dead,” then, offers the reverse image of Joyce’s optimistic (though also ironic) reflection of himself posed by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), an untested but confident artist who leaves his family and his country to escape the environmental ties that would surely impede his artistic development. Joyce was working on “The Dead” at the same time he was transforming his fragmentary Stephen Hero (1944) into the more carefully controlled narrative that was to become his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. No doubt his mind was playing on two extreme alternatives during this period following the most important decision he had made in his life to that point. “The Dead” can be seen as Joyce’s portrait of the failed artist as an older man (though not necessarily a wiser one).

As a young man, Joyce scorned the provincial limitations of Dublin and the enthusiasm of the Irish nationalists for native culture and folkways. As an older and more mature writer, Joyce continued to draw on those elements, dominant in his memory and imagination, for the rest of his creative life. Joyce never really lost touch with the fact that he was Irish and Catholic by birth and background. Although the stories of Dubliners all document the spiritual impoverishment of Irish life, and “The Dead” is no exception in that regard, Gabriel is stunted in his human potential mainly because of his arrogant rejection of the culture in which he has chosen to live. His character shaped by frustration, rancor, and disappointment, this teacher still has much to learn about his country, his family, and himself.

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