What is the significance of the title "The Dead" in James Joyce's Dubliners?
James Joyce includes “The Dead” as part of his novel Dubliners and, in it, we can see the title played out in the way the characters are “dead” to themselves and the world. They act one way but are completely different under the surface. We can also detect a particular set of attitudes toward Ireland.
The story centers around a party, a time that is supposed to be festive on the feast of Epiphany. Most of the characters try hard to engage in the festivities, but in some ways, they are “dead,” dead to their true feelings and their true selves under the façade they show to the world.
Look at Gabriel, for instance. He is extremely uncomfortable with the party in general. He has to take care of the drunk Freddy, and he enters into a debate with Miss Ivors about the nature of Ireland. She accuses...
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Gabriel of lacking interest in and support for Ireland. Gabriel is sick of Ireland and everything to do with it, but he knows that it is part of him whether he wants it or not.
The story ends on a solemn, even grim note. Gabriel's wife, Gretta, is saddened by a song performed at the party. She tells her husband that a former lover sang that song to her before he died. Gabriel ends the story thinking about his mortality. He has not really been living, no matter how he appears to the rest of the world. His life is routine, boring, lifeless. There is no joy or peace, not even real happiness. Everything is dead, and Gabriel wonders if perhaps it would not be best to be so literally.
We can also glimpse attitudes toward Ireland in this story. Joyce is, perhaps, suggesting that in some ways Ireland, too, is dead, caught in the bland routines of life, having lost its fire and its spirit. Miss Ivors might say that this is because Ireland's people have lost their fire and spirit.
How does "The Dead" contribute to the meaning of Joyce's Dubliners and its goal of "spiritual liberation" for Ireland?
One of the primary recurring themes when speaking broadly about
Dubliners is the idea of slow stagnation or complete paralysis in
one's personal development and how that might relate to a larger cultural
paralysis. The primary character of "The Dead" is no stranger to this
feeling.
Widely considered to be the greatest of all the works in Dubliners,
"The Dead" concerns a professor named Gabriel who is attending a Christmas
party. We are given evidence that Gabriel's life is largely devoid of any sort
of passion, but he does feel an uncommon longing and lust when he sees his
wife's passion for the music. Later, he attempts to make a sexual advance on
her, but he comes to understand that her passion in that moment was for the
memory of a previous, deceased lover.
Gabriel is overwhelmed by the weight of his stagnated relationship but is
struck with a sort of epiphany in how it relates to the state of Ireland at the
time. In the climax of the play, it is related that "one by one they were all
becoming shades." For the first time in his life, Gabriel feels profoundly
connected to all of Ireland, both the living and the dead, despite largely
renouncing it as a dying culture previously. "The Dead" brings all of the
stagnation from previous stories to a national metaphor, and Gabriel himself is
largely a culmination of all previous characters in terms of his many burdens
and frustrations.