Gabriel suffers the awful realisation that the woman he loves has, all their marriage, loved another unattainable man. Gabriel ‘shy of intruding on her grief’ lets her sleep beside him. She discloses that the song reminded her of a youth she had loved who had died. In their hotel room Gretta is unresponsive to his amorous mood, ‘why did she seem so abstracted’. ‘Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory’.
The party ends and on the way back to their hotel, following Gretta though the snow he is overcome by love and lust for his wife. Gabriel notes that his wife was lost in a reflective enchantment by the song but thinks little of it, ‘a sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart’. The reader may well wonder why the story is entitled The Dead. One of the guests, a Mr D’Arcy, sings a song, ‘The lass of Aughrim’. Set at Christmas in middle-class Dublin, c.1905, Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta, in their 30s/40s, visit his aunts’ jolly Christmas party where a good time is had by all singing, feasting and dancing. After the frankly disappointing visit to the unrelievedly maudlin Louise Gluck, this was uplifting. When I read the hyperbolic statement that this is the best story ever written I was naturally sceptical but I was not disappointed. It was Tim’s choice for our January ‘short story/novella’.Ī 58-page story or novella, the last in Joyce’s Dubliners completed 1905/6 when Joyce was only 23/24 although not published until 1914. Published in 1914, it has been described by many as the finest short story ever written. The Dead is the final story in James Joyce’s short story collection, Dubliners.
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