James Joyce's The Dead: Gabriel Conroy

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“The Dead,” written by James Joyce center around an upper-class individual name Gabriel Conroy. Right from the start, Joyce didn’t hold back on how he wanted to portrayed Conroy’s character in a negative way. Conroy’s brief conversation with his aunt maid show how clumsy he is. “O, then, said Gabriel gaily, I suppose we 'll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh?” (Page 2) He clumsily provoked a defensive statement from the overworked maid about her love life. Instead of apologizing or explaining what he meant, Gabriel quickly ends the conversation by giving the maid a holiday tip. “Then he took a coin rapidly from his pocket.--O Lily, he said, thrusting it into her hands, it 's Christmas-time, isn 't it? …show more content…

After the night that he had with Gretta, Gabriel looked deeply into himself and realized that he wasn’t comfortable with how his life is at the moment and felt that a change was needed. The talk he had with Gretta about Furey really caused Gabriel to experienced an inward change that made him examine his own life and human life in general. He reflected on his own controlled, passionless life, and realized that life is short, and those who leave the world like Michael Furey, with great passion, in fact live more fully than people like himself. Gabriel saw himself as a shadow of a person, flickering in a world in which the living and the dead meet. He finally realized that the dead live on all thanks to the death of Michael Furey. At the end of the story, the author open the possibility that Gabriel might change his attitude and embrace life for the first time in a long time. In conclusion, Gabriel Conroy was one of the most arrogant and ecocentric person in the world. He was focus on himself rather than thinking about other people that was less in social status than him. But in the end, the reader saw a glimmer of hope that Conroy can change his attitude and embrace life for the first time. Death can be a sad moment for one person, but it can also help open a new life for someone