James Joyce
James Joyce (1882-1941)
The Dead
Irish
Modernism
James Joyce, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, was born in Dublin into an affluent Irish family. Over the course of his childhood, however, his father’s drinking and a series of job losses caused his family to lose both income and social status. The eldest of ten children, Joyce was singled out for his academic potential and attended Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College, both Jesuit schools. He later graduated from University College, Dublin, where he had already begun publishing essays. For most of his adult life, James lived as an expatriate, travelling in Europe but living mostly in Trieste, Zurich and Paris in the company of Nora Barnacle, a young woman with whom he eloped in 1904 and eventually married. Initially, he supported Nora and himself teaching English. Joyce and Nora had two children, Giorgio and Lucia. Lucia spent most of her adult life institutionalized for schizophrenia and estranged from her mother. Joyce, who struggled with health problems related to his drinking and to eye problems, died in 1941 of complications from surgery for a perforated ulcer. He was 59.
Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses (1922), is written as a modern version of Homer’s Odyssey and tells the story of one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, making his way around Dublin. His other prominent works include the experimental and obscure Finnegans Wake (1939), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and the short story collection Dubliners (1914). Like T.S. Eliot, Joyce is known for his highly allusive style in Ulysses; the book requires a separate handbook to explain its complex structure, the texts it parallels, and its many, many literary references. As a modernist and avant garde writer, Joyce is credited, along with Virginia Woolf, with pioneering the use of stream of consciousness as a literary technique.
Like the rest of the short stories collected in Dubliners, “The Dead” was written when Joyce was in his twenties, but it was not published until later because of a long feud between Joyce and his publisher over concerns about libel. The collection presents a view of ordinary people in Dublin during a period characterized by intense nationalistic struggles and a renaissance of Irish culture. The thematic structure of the collection depicts an individual’s movement from childhood to maturity.
“The Dead” is the longest story in the collection and is sometimes published separately as a novella. It is generally considered to be the most complex and haunting story in the collection. Thematically, the story addresses contemporary concerns about Irish national and cultural identity, memory, and loss. The story is set during a Christmas party at the home of Kate and Julia Morkin, the aunts of the story’s protagonist, Gabriel Conroy. As the narrative unfolds, Gabriel gives a dinnertime speech, confronts an Irish nationalist schoolteacher, and has a final emotional scene with his wife Gretta, who has been sentimentally reminded of the tragic death of her first love.
Consider while reading:
- Scholars often speak of the theme of “paralysis” that runs throughout the entire collection of stories in Dubliners. In what way do you see that theme unfolding in “The Dead’?
- At the end of the story, the narrator notes that the snow is falling all over Ireland, on both the living and the dead. What is the symbolic significance of the snow?
- Besides the obvious reference to Gretta’s dead lover, what other references might we infer by the short story’s title?
Written by Anita Turlington