The Dead: Ireland in silent snow

  The Dead is a last short story in James Joyce's Dubliners story. The interesting fact about Joyce is that, in his letter to Grant Richards, he said this: I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to be the center of paralysis. Then a question is that, why did he described Dublin as a paralyzed city and wrote about it?

  There are two main ways to interpret paralysis. Dubliners were written during the Irish Literary Renaissance, which was mainly conducted for the Irish to show that they could be independent of Britain. Joyce wrote Dubliners at a time when Ireland was under the British rule, the Irish were governed and had no independence. At the same time, Irish nationalism was stagnating cultural progression, placing Dublin at the heart of this regressive movement. In one of the short stories The Dead, the paralysis is described in a complex manner using many symbols and satires.

  The paralysis Joyce mainly likes to criticize through The Dead(or probably whole Dubliners stories) is discriminations between different social classes. One of the most primary devices Joyce uses is sound, which contributes to setting the mood in the entire novel and also works as direct symbolism in some scenes. 

  The main character of The Dead Gabriel is described as a very arrogant person who regards his social hierarchy as a justification for him to differentiate himself from others, therefore works as a symbol of the paralysis. Such characteristic is vividly shown in the novel using different sound methods, and one of them is his speech in a party. In the scene he prepares for the speech – which can be considered as a paraphrase of sound –, he thinks other people in the party are not educated enough to understand his speech and considers fixing his speech.

“He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand… They would think that he was airing his superior education. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure.”(Joyce, 4)

  The disregarding and proud attitude of Gabriel against other people in the party is the thing Joyce wanted to point out in the Irish society that is hampering them from moving forward.

  The sound that shows Gabriel's elitist and arrogant manner can also be found in his ordinary conversations with others who he regards as lower class people. These often make awkward situations because his tone – which mirrors his intention – does not correspond with the content he talks to others. For example, while Gabriel talks gaily to Lily about her wedding, he receives a response of great bitterness: ‘The men that are now is only all palaver.' (Joyce, 3) He also talks to Miss Ivors in a solemn manner, but she mocks him by calling him "West Briton". Even Gretta, at the end of the story, fails to understand Gabriel's desire to have love with her but starts to talk about her past love instead. These contrary conversations show the invisible gap between Gabriel and others, which must be caused by the awareness of different social status they have.

  The epiphany moment of Gabriel is when he cries after listening to Gretta's past love story and sees snow falls gently outside the window, gently covering all over Ireland. Gretta's past lover Michael Furey was a lower class guy – he was in the gasworks – who was good at singing, and he died at the age of 17 for Gretta. Here, Gretta remembers the song – sound – of her past lover while she was listening to Bartell D'Arcy singing a song named ‘The Lass of Aughrim' and seems to feel more attached to it than either Gabriel's speech or tone. The fact that the person who Gretta actually loves was in the lower social status first hits Gabriel. This makes Gabriel have the epiphany that In front of death, nothing matters. People from different social status don't have a different chance to encounter death someday, which makes everything quite meaningless. Also, the novel ends with the scene of gently falling snow, which makes a strong contrast with the previous scenes which was full of party noises including casual conversations and music. This represents that numerous sounds and tones of people with different background and position all get silent in front of the death, which is symbolized as snow that was general all over Ireland.

  The Dead shows how discrimination and paralysis come out to be meaningless in the sense of death using different auditory devices. Therefore, Joyce tries to show Irish people throughout the novel that this paralytic state they had fallen into is all meaningless and the continuation of such state will necessarily lead Ireland to the dark future.