![]() He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The epiphany that follows at the end of the story is certainly more decisive, but its lasting significance nevertheless remains ambiguous: This moment suggests a fleeting encounter with his own image as others see it, and, by extension, a momentary awareness that there are other people in the world living their own lives and negotiating their own heartbreak. As he passed in the way of the cheval-glass he caught sight of himself in full length, his broad, well-filled shirt-front, the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror, and his glimmering gilt-rimmed eyeglasses. Gabriel stood stockstill for a moment in astonishment and then followed her. She broke loose from him and ran to the bed and, throwing her arms across the bed-rail, hid her face. This epiphany often provides a similar function to a plot twist or denouement in a more traditional (i.e., plot-driven) story: at the end of a detective story the mystery is solved and the criminal unmasked, for instance.Ĭonsider Gabriel’s encounter with his own reflection in the mirror in the hotel room: See the example of Gabriel’s ‘Generous tears’ below, for instance.Īnother key feature of James Joyce’s short stories, as with the stories of other modernist writers like Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield, is the epiphany: a realisation or revelation experienced by a central character in the story. One of the effects of this, of course, is that it becomes difficult to know when a particular word or phrase should be heard in the narrator’s voice or in the ‘voice’ of one of the characters. Joyce artfully balances detachment against intimacy, free indirect discourse against narratorial objectivity, throughout the story. Throughout ‘The Dead’, Joyce brings us closer to the (inner) speech of the characters, principally Gabriel Conroy, while also allowing some degree of detachment from those characters: the effect is akin to a film camera going in for a close-up so we can observe a character’s mood and emotions, before switching to a long or wide shot of the room. Despite his rather gauche social manners, Conroy is in many ways the centrepiece, the male figure at the heart of the social occasion: he is his aunts’ favourite nephew, to whom they entrust the duty (but also honour) of carving the goose at the dinner, and delivering the after-dinner speech (in the course of which we learn more of Conroy’s mild intellectual snobbery and social awkwardness). Through such moments, and the other details Joyce provides of the interplay between the hostesses and their guests (especially Gabriel Conroy), we learn about the fraught social, religious, and political issues Dubliners have to negotiate in the course of their lives. ![]() He then tries to compliment Lily, the caretaker’s daughter and a servant at the house, but this backfires because of his social awkwardness. Gabriel makes a comment about how long it takes his wife to get dressed. After a description of the preparations being made for the party, Gabriel arrives with his wife, Gretta. The setting for the story, like a number of other stories in Dubliners, is a social occasion: a party thrown by the aunts of the central character, Gabriel Conroy.
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