The Dead By James Joyce Research Paper

Lingering Death

James Joyce was a meticulous writer. Each and every word was calculated, and his signature “style of scrupulous meanness,” made Dubliners singular and Joyce a world-wide celebrity. Joyce articulates in sparse but concrete language the life in his birthplace, Dublin, in the fifteen short glimpses. This meanness of language, which was used intentionally, invokes a feeling that surrounds entirety of Dubliners: death. In The Dead, the last story of Dubliners and arguably the finest ghost story written in English, death is present not only in form of ghost, but in form of every character, every sound, and every word. However, its presence is not blatant. Joyce was too clever for such indelicacies. Death subtly discloses itself through

Malins, who had been silent all through the supper, said that her son was going down to Mount Melleray in a week or so.”(D 137) According to the story the guests unfold of what they know about Mount Melleray, “the monks there never spoke, got up at two in the morning and slept in their coffins.”(D 137) When Mr. Brown questions why they would even sleep in coffins, Mary Jane answers, “the coffin is to remind them of their last end.”(D 137) This slightly morbid idea of sleeping in coffin adds more to the deathly suffocation and suspense building up in the story. The paradox! To be reminded of something that has not yet happened. To be reminded of death. Only those who died can be reminded of their deaths: ghosts. In this particular story, it is not the monk who sleeps in the coffin to be reminded of his death, but the ghost who lies in coffin, waiting to be woken up, waiting to be reminded of its death. Hence the preparation for the appearance of a ghost is

She remembers the love they shared and his death that she blames herself for. The song, the connection between Gretta and Michael, becomes a key by which the door that separates the land of the living and the land of the dead is opened. Gabriel, worried about Gretta’s melancholy silence, inquire her if anything is wrong. Gretta then opens her mind to Gabriel, and reveal that Michael, her young lover used to sing the same song to her. (D 152) According to her story, Michael, harrowed by the idea that Gretta was leaving for a convent, “did not want to live.”(D 150) Rather than choosing his health, Michael chose to be with Gretta till the end of his life. By sharing this memory with Gabriel, Michael is materialized in minds of two people: a ghost, a memory carrying