The Dead By James Joyce

Born in the early months of 1882, James Joyce was an incredible Irish novelist and poet. With a number of published works circulating the globe, The Dead is arguably one of his more personal works. The parallelism between author and main character is undeniable. The main purpose of Gabriel Conroy is seemingly to represent James Joyce and his views on life at the time. That representation depends on how one views the book. The two interpretations are: Gabriel Conroy in The Dead at the end of the Dubliners and then Gabriel as an individual in The Dead as its own entity.

As a connected piece to the Dubliners and following stories with themes of: seclusion, paralysis, temptation, etc. Gabriel represents Joyce as a collection of all of the themes

Both Joyce and Gabriel almost reject the Irish ways and display “ West Britain” characteristics, similarly to the character of Mr. Duffy in A Painful Case. The main theme exposed between Gabriel, Mr. Duffy, and even Joyce himself in this case is paralysis. Mr. Duffy has both a mental and physical paralysis. He is stuck in a mundane cycle, trapped by OCD. Gabriel is trapped at the party and in his mundane life. Joyce was stagnant in the progression of his life. He was working a very boring tedious job at the time and did not get to write as much as he wanted to. “ He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor hear her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.” ( Joyce, 84) The paralysis Mr. Duffy feels in this moment is the same Gabriel feels at the end when he is watching the snow. The last scene, “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” (Joyce, 160) serves as a final realization that Gabriel is just another dead body floating around in a dead world. The two characters are isolated by choice and have no one to turn to but the realization of their

Gabriel starts his journey reclusive and distant from his own wife. As the story progresses, he builds in character and grows closer to his wife. Much like Gabriel, Joyce has a beautiful charming wife that happens to be from Galway which is the same region Gretta is from in the book. The real clinching piece of information that cements the idea of Joyce writing about himself, through the character Gabriel, is found in the last few pages of the book. Gabriel is admiring his wife, “She had no longer any grace of attitude, but Gabriel’s eyes were still bright with happiness. The blood went bounding along his veins; and the thoughts went rioting through his brain, proud, joyful, tender, valorous” (Joyce, 153) in hopes of taken her to bed later. The scene rejuvenating the love but the mood quickly turns sour with the mention of an admirer from her past, Michael Furey. Michael Furey was so in love with Gretta that he gave the ultimate sacrifice when she left -- his life. “So she had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake.” (Joyce, 159) Although he was deathly ill at the time, Gretta believes wholeheartedly that this man she knew growing up had died because of her. After all, he did come out in foul weather just to see her before her departure to the convent. Upon research it was