James Joyce's The Dead

Usually one would not dare suggest reading the final paragraph of any work first, but in this case nothing is given away. Just know that the power and resonant beauty of this paragraph is immeasurably increased when you arrive here through the journey of the story.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. 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.

James Joyce, The Dead

This longer short story from the collection Dubliners is a rich feast through which one may taste the world of Joyce. Nothing – NOTHING – in Joyce is casual. Each image, reference, description carries symbolic resonance. Career Joyce scholars may try to align all the references, but I like W. Tindall’s attitude:

“The text is not a system of mathematical equations but a flexible relationship of possibilities . . .”

William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce

Bearing this in mind, we will dig at some of these references to give a sense of the richness in the writing. Pay attention to the title, even as it sits in contrast with the opening scene of the story itself – how is the image of death and the dead brought up throughout the work?

This story also holds to Joyce’s fascination with epiphanies – moments of sudden and intense illumination in which a profound truth is, or may be, revealed. Joyce describes an epiphany as ‘the most delicate and evanescent of moments’ that offers ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in memorable phase of the mind itself’. For Joyce, these moments did not occur at the height of the heroic or dramatic gesture, but in the ordinary acts of life. What are the moments in The Dead that fit this description? More importantly, what is revealed?