The Dead Page #13

"The Dead" is not a standalone book but is the final short story in James Joyce's collection, "Dubliners". This story follows the protagonist Gabriel Conroy through a Christmas season feast, where he grapples with issues of identity and Irish Nationalism. The narrative culminates with Gabriel's profound emotional epiphany about love, mortality and the continuity of life and death, invoked by hearing about his wife's past lover who died young.

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husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept as
though he and she had never lived together as man and wife. His curious
eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair: and, as he thought of
what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty,
a strange, friendly pity for her entered his soul. He did not like to
say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful but he knew
that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved
death.

Perhaps she had not told him all the story. His eyes moved to the chair
over which she had thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat string
dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen
down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. He wondered at his riot of
emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt’s
supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the
merry-making when saying good-night in the hall, the pleasure of the
walk along the river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon
be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had
caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was
singing Arrayed for the Bridal. Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in
that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees.
The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside
him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He
would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and
would find only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very
soon.

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself
cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by
one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other
world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally
with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her
heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told
her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that
himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love.
The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness
he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping
tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where
dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not
apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was
fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which
these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and
dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had
begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark,
falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to
set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow
was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark
central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of
Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous
Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely
churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly
drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the
little gate, on the barren thorns. 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.
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