Gabriel\'s epiphany analisi PDF

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Gabriel’s epiphany, Dubliners, James JoyceGabriel’s epiphany is one of the most important text of the final story of “Dubliners”. In this text, Gabriel and his wife, Gretta, are at the annual Christmas party. When the party is about to end, Gretta hears a song that reminds her of boy, Micheal Furey,...

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Gabriel’s epiphany, Dubliners, James Joyce Gabriel’s epiphany is one of the most important text of the final story of “Dubliners”. In this text, Gabriel and his wife, Gretta, are at the annual Christmas party. When the party is about to end, Gretta hears a song that reminds her of boy, Micheal Furey, who died for her when she was 17 years old. When the party is over, the spouses return to their room in a hotel nearby: Gabriel is consummated with physically passion but Gretta is thinking about Micheal. She falls asleep and Gabriel watches her with pity and he thinks about her. The main antithesis of this text is the metaphorical pattern of life and death. The whole scene seem to lose a precise temporal connotation because Gabriel’s thoughts begin to wander from past to present and future. Thus the scene acquires the tone of eternal truth. In Gabriel’s thoughts we can found the conflicts of death and life, taking and giving, past, present and future. At the end of the party, Gretta thinks about Micheal and Gabriel realizes that the guests of the party and he are dead for Gretta than Micheal, his lover, who is alive in Gretta’s heart. So Gabriel, at the end of the party, becomes one with all the living and the dead and he learns from the memory of a dead young man that a brief passionate life can be more meaningful than a long passionless one. Joyce’s language is poetic. He makes a realistic description but he uses also symbols. The personal names are symbols too. Gabriel is the prince of fire and the angel of death. As for Michael, he is an angel too, and he will live in Gretta’s memory forever, overshadowing the weak presence of her husband. The falling snow, instead, symbolically reconciles life and death. As with all Joyce’s endings, the reader can only guess what the morning after will bring to Gabriel....