The Dead [short story]

I went back to an old favorite a day or two ago. I started rereading The Dead, which is the last story in James Joyce’s Dubliners, and a novella in itself. I chose it because it was one of the titles I encountered in the audiobook I’m currently reading, and the discussion of it reminded me not only of how much I love the story, but of how much meaning can be taken from even a short read. Over the years I’ve found so many different things to ponder in this story, and I thought that refreshing my acquaintance with it would be a good start to the year.

This time I found myself focused more on Gabriel than anyone else, focused on his nervous self-consciousness which reminds me so much of my own. I watched him fret over his speech, show more still stinging from a criticism which may or may not have been mean-spirited, it’s hard to tell when we can only see it from his point of view. I found myself impatient with him because he mirrored the things in myself that make me impatient. And yet this time, I saw what a huge thing it was for him to turn away from the possibility of irrational anger and toward a deeper, greater understanding, not just of his wife and their marriage, but of life and love in general.

Gabriel is changed by his willingness to go beyond his own insecurities to understand and feel empathy for his wife’s sorrow. We can redeem ourselves, I think Joyce is telling us, if we step outside of our own heads and attempt to understand the lives of those around us.

I made the right choice of reading material. The story refreshed me, helped me shake off the mental fatigue I’d been feeling. More than that, I want to recommend this story to everyone as one that touches concerns that we all share because we’re all human beings. show less

A review below described this as deceptively brilliant, and that's really quite on point. The first 90% of the book is an adequate but somewhat tedious exploration of a dinner party of its time (and the social conventions involved). It's very 'at arms length'. The ending - well, that's a different story. I've little time for Joyce's general cleverness, but the Dead certainly shows his ability to cut to the quick emotionally when he needs - or wants - to.

It’s snowy in Dublin as guests arrive for the Misses Morkan’s annual Christmas dinner dance. There’s bustle, busyness, confusion of names and relationships, comings and goings, greetings and gossip. It felt better suited to the stage (and I later found out it has been adapted for stage and screen). The hosts are musical and generous, but middle class and not affluent.

And so it continued for about 20 of about 30 pages, adding a little context for most of the characters. I found it rather dull (even though the central character, Gabriel, reviews books

This was a good introduction to James Joyce. Short yet enticing. Joyce is indeed a master of words and tells a story without embellishment.

Despite its melancholy tone, The Dead leaves one with a feeling of hope. Gabriel Conroy might have been a smug, hypocritical and somewhat shallow character, but the eerie ending with the snow falling "upon all the living and the dead" sets the stage for Gabriel's second epiphany. It lets the reader know that he has undergone a transformation that just might allow him to have a genuine connection to his wife.

This was really great, exactly what I needed and I read it in one sitting. You can tell that the characters are holding back and when they finally reveal what they are thinking, it’s so powerful. The setting was also very well described, I felt so cold in the hotel room at the end just by the descriptions.

An extraordinary piece of fiction which starts off being about one thing, then turns into a story about something else, but then turns in a completely different story. Joyce does this in a seamless way that makes it seem inevitable. The very end is devastating.

Had to read it for school and it was boring, hard to get through and of course school books make books really tedious and take the fun out of reading (most of the time) so that adds an extra layer of frustration. The book didn’t really have a plot, in my opinion and was kind of all over the place. I don’t understand the hype of this book or James Joyce but maybe everyone else also had to read this for school. There are so many classics that are much better written, make more sense, have messages that are easier to follow and invoke more feelings and thoughts while reading and in the future when you’re reflecting on the book and the messages within. Even the audiobook was terrible, which is unfortunate because that’s the only way show more to get through it without taking massive breaks to process the older language. It’s not even a short book because it’s so hard to get through and digest, given the language, time period, and setting. Also I don’t really understand why we read it because it was set in Ireland and I didn’t know half the places or understand any of the events of that time period so I was missing a lot of context. It felt sort of unorganized and not a cohesive story and I couldn’t tell who the main character was. Every time a character was introduced, they got a few more in-depth pages and then the book moved on to a different character, making it hard to figure out who the main character was, empathize and relate to the characters and follow and remember what was going on with them and who everyone was. I did like the Gretta storyline in the end (the reason I say storyline rather than what the book was supposedly all about, is because there were so many other converstations that even though this was the only real ‘plot’, it felt like a side-plot.) and the vulnerability of that scene but Gabriel was very weird and his reaction was gross and immature, but maybe that was how men were at the time? In summation, I think if it wasn’t a ‘classic’, this book wouldn’t be read much in modern times and would get bad reviews and people would say it’s boring, scattered, confusing, unrelatable and has no plot. I will be removing all of my James Joyce books (if I have any) off my TBR. show less