The Dead

The Modernist movement of the early twentieth century England drastically changed the way literature was perceived in Western society. Modernism has a lot to do with how individuals relate to the world around them. Mainly, it focuses on a deep mistrust and alienation of long time and old institutions like government, religion, and family. “The Dead,” from James Joyce's collection Dubliners, is on its surface a fairly simple story. A man and his wife attend a holiday party, but during the course of the party, and the after hours that follow, we see a character struggling to accept his place as a man aging in a new world. Also, at the end, we see in the story Joyce's development of the important Modernist literary technique: stream-of-conscious,

This was a post-World War I society where people could no longer recognize themselves or the others around them. According to The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, “many wrote with a sense that the world was not the ordered and coherent whole that it had widely assumed to be at the dawn of the twentieth century” (Black 1040). The story begins with the protagonist Gabriel and his wife attending his aunt’s holiday party. At a certain point, Gabriel goes downstairs and talks to Lily, the maid. When he asks if she will be married soon, he gets an “bitter” (Joyce 1245) and rather impolite response: “the men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you” (Joyce 1245). Gabriel then senses he may have said something wrong. His time with Lily can be seen as an instance of Gabriel’s alienation and disconnect from the younger generation. Later, music begins playing and the guests start dancing. Gabriel likes music, but the very first song is what he calls an “academy piece” (Joyce 1249). While it is not stated if the music is of new generation, it is played by a younger pianist. Gabriel does not like it as he states: “the piece she was playing had no melody for him and he doubted whether it had any melody for the other listeners” (Joyce 1249). This is the second time we see Gabriel alienated from mainstream

He reminisces about how his aunts will soon be dead, and the fact that he himself is aging. The theme of aging is brought up several times throughout the story, whenever Gabriel notices his disconnect from the younger generation, but is most evident at the story's conclusion, when Gabriel not only has his deepest appreciation of the quick passage of time, but also understands himself and his wife to have been passed up by time. Already, he senses, they've left the current moment and become part of history. “One by one they were all becoming shades. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world” (Joyce 1264). The snow covering all of Ireland can be seen as a physical manifestation of Gabriel’s consciousness of death and age because everything is under ice and the force of the falling snow covers people and buries them to be forgotten in the depths of time. “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (Joyce