The dead - James Joyce\'s The Dead analysis and introduction PDF

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James Joyce's The Dead analysis and introduction...

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The Dead Dubliners - James Joyce

➣The Dead takes place in January → it is Christmas The indoors inside the house of the season, not on Christmas Eve but on the twelfth night, M r s M o r c a n s i s a s y m b o l o f the epiphany, and Gabriel Conroy with his wife Gretta claustrophobia and imprisonment come to Dublin (he lives in another town) every year for a while the outside where the snow is dinner party at his aunts’ house, the Mrs. Morcans → covering Dublin is a symbol of the two aunts are very very old and they were music freedom. teacher → one of them sings a song “arrayed for the bridal”.! ➣There is also the younger piano teacher so they dance and there is a tenor who starts to sing an opera tune ⇒ music is very important in the story and linked with the epiphany.! ➣Gabriel is not directly involved in music, he is an intellectual, a writer and he writes for a newspaper → Gabriel considers himself cleverer than the rest of the people invited at the party, because a part from Mrs. Morcans, aunt Julia and Gabriel’s wife, Gretta, there are music students of the two sisters → there is also a man that is always drunk and his mother ⇒ it is a large party. ! ➣The snow is falling in Dublin and Gabriel is wearing galoshes (are like rubber things you put on your shoes so that you don’t ruin and spoil your shoes) → he is wearing them because of the bad weather but the galoshes are also a symbol of Gabriel himself that feels isolated, he is detached, he feels superior and he is the one that will deliver a speech during the meal to show off his skills as a writer but the evening will turn into a failure for him, and the failure has 3 steps:! coat and the galoshes → he is very insensitive and he makes a silly remark → he miss behaved so she is very angry with him and she does not like the stock sentence and she is offended → Gabriel make up things, gives her a little money and she feels like a prostitute ⇒ she is crossed.! hooked on this Irish roots and independence and she is also cross with Gabriel → they danced together and Miss Ivors tells Gabriel off, reproaches him because he has written some articles for a newspaper that has British rather than Irish sympathies and also she calls him “West Briton”, that means “you are a servant of the people in Britain instead of taking aside for Ireland”. ! Miss Ivors while, they are dancing, invites Gabriel to spend the summer on the Aran Isles, a beautiful island on the west coast of Ireland, very wild, with small villages where people speaks Gaelic → Miss Ivors wants to provoke Gabriel but he says no because ha has already planned to go to Europe → Miss Ivors gets so crossed because she said that he is betraying his country ⇒ she stops dancing, goes away and leaves the party.! conversation but everybody asks the banal questions → it is a group of people that are respectable and good but they are like dead → “The dead” of the title refers also to the people invited at the party. ! Then they have dinners, Gabriel delivers his speech but Michael was a good singer and he often he does not feel satisfied → then it is quite old that sang to her “the lass of Aughrim” and anybody starts to go away and Gabriel and his wife this is why the song that Gretta hears Gretta are the last together with the tenor → the tenor reminds her Michael Furey. ! starts to sing a song “the lass of Aughrim” and Gabriel can see that his wife his deeply moved and she is going The word “Lass” in the Celtic language to cry, she is stuck listening to the music on the stairs means girl and she is having her epiphany but Gabriel does not understand what is going on.! Later they said goodbye to the two Mrs Morcans and they travel back to the hotel where they are going to spend the night. ! When they get back to the hotel and also during the journey at the hotel, Gabriel has a romantic idea and he wants to stay there alone with his wife but she is very absent and he tries to speak to her but he can see that, after hearing the song at the end of the party, she is very distant and she is lost in her thoughts → when they get to their bedroom, Gabriel would like to be nice to his wife but she is so distant that he asks her what is going on and she suddenly starts to cry and tells him about Michael Furey (is an omphone and means violence passion), Gretta’s ex-boyfriend, a young boy that Gretta met him in Galway when she was there to visit her grandmother, he was 16 like her. He was ill, probably with tb. !

Gretta had to come back to Dublin or to go to a college and the doctor had warned Michael to stay at home and to stay away from the cold but he decided not to obey the doctor and comes to Gretta’s house one evening when it was raining to say goodbye to her. ! He went back but in the meantime he has exposed himself to the cold and so his health will get worse and in a few day Gretta comes to know that he is dead.! ⇓ It is a big failure for Gabriel because when Gretta tells him about Micheal Furey, he fells jealous and irritated but then he becomes aware of the situation (he believe that is was better than the others).! Gabriel Conroy and Micheal Furey ➣Differently from Gabriel that is wearing galoshes, Furey was real lover, a passionate young man;! ➣Furey worked in the gas work (→ gas work is something full of energy) in contrast to Gabriel who gets very jealous because at last Gretta says “I think he died for me” (→ we come to know that Furey comes to Gretta’s house under the heavy rain and he was ill.) ⇒ Gretta has her epiphany: she understands that the love of her life is not her husband, because there is not love between them.! ➣Gabriel is like somebody who is dead because he is spiritually dead for his wife; on the contrary Micheal is dead, but is still alive in Gretta’s mind and can provoke very strong emotions in her.!...