James Joyce and the Dead

In the year of 1882 in Dublin a famous writer of the name James Joyce was born and as of the year of 1941 in Zurich, Switzerland James Joyce passed away at the age of 59. Joyce began his career by writing short stories that engraved, with extraordinary clarity, aspects of Dublin life. These stories were published a part of the Dubliners in 1914. Fifteen stories of his filled the pages within Dubliners the stories are: The Sisters, An Encounter, Araby, Eveline, After the Race, Two Gallants, The boarding house, A little cloud, Counterparts, clay, A painful case, Ivy day in the Committee room, A mother, Grace and The Dead. He then went onto write the following novels: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegan’s Wake (1939). The last story in Dubliners, "The Dead," was not part of the original draft of the book but was added later. At a festive event, attended by guests whose portraits Joyce draws with precision and economy, a series of jolting events frees the protagonist, Gabriel, from his possessiveness and egotism. The view he attains at the end is the mood of supreme neutrality.

Many themes and concepts are present throughout “The Dead” such as male dominance, power class, nationalist, love, nostalgia, hopelessness, decay, and epiphany. In "The Dead," Gabriel Conroy's restrained behavior and his reputation with his aunts as the nephew who takes care of everything marks him as the man of authority and caution, but two encounters with women at the party challenge his confidence. Firstly, Gabriel clumsily provokes a defensive statement from the overworked Lily when he asks her about her love life. Instead of apologising or explaining what he meant, Gabriel quickly ends the conversation by giving ...

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...t, and those who leave the world like Michael Furey, with great passion in fact live more fully than people like himself.

We can see that without these other characters the protagonist would not .By the end of “The Dead” Gabriel Conroy has become a symbol of isolation of the modern man.

Bibliography

 Hobby, Blake. “Alienation in James Joyce’s Dubliners.” Alienation. New York: Blooms literary Criticism, 2009. 61-69. Print

 Winston, Greg C. “Militarism and ‘The Dead’.” A New and Complex Sensation: Essays on Joyce’s Dubliners. Dublin: Lilliput, 2004. 122-32. Print.

 Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. 3rd ed. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2004.

 The Dead Greenblatt, Stephen, and M.H. Abrams, eds. Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 2. 8th Ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. pp. 2

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