The Dead

James Joyce

Dec 2020 · Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing · Narrated by Jim Girard

About this audiobook

"The Dead" is the final short story in the 1914 collection Dubliners by James Joyce. The other stories in the collection are shorter, whereas at 15,952 words, "The Dead" is almost long enough to be described as a novella.

The story deals with themes of love and loss as well as raising questions about the nature of the Irish identity.

The story centres on Gabriel Conroy, a professor and part-time book reviewer, and explores the relationships he has with his family and friends. Gabriel and his wife, Gretta, arrive late to an annual Christmas party hosted by his aunts, Kate and Julia Morkan, who eagerly receive him. After a somewhat awkward encounter with Lily, the caretaker's daughter, Gabriel goes upstairs and joins the rest of the party attendees. Gabriel worries about the speech he has to give, especially because it contains academic references that he fears his audience will not understand. When Freddy Malins arrives drunk, as the hosts of the party had feared, Aunt Kate asks Gabriel to make sure he is all right.

Among the most significant works James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Dubliners, The Sisters, Eveline, After the Race, An Encounter, Araby, The Boarding House, Counterparts, Clay, A Painful Case, Ivy Day in the Committee Room, A Mother, Two Gallants, A Little Cloud, Grace.

Ratings and reviews

Drawing near the end of the story I felt a kinship to Gabriel and the pressed outlook of his trivial merryments. such passions that his wife had experienced and such dullness that he entertained were two separate extreams judged against different experiences. In those insights of oneself this story drew out from me, I found my past more zealous and hopeful self guided into the gray where the lost lover lays in the afterlife of memories that Gabriel looks upon in spite of the whiteout of the winter blending such places in the crisp canvas of a frozen Ireland. I gather that the dead are those who capitulate the idea that life in contentment is a burden bordering against the opportunity to experience new and thrilling ecstasies that have yet to be discovered within one's own body and mind. I feel that James Joyce would hearken unto the reader that this is not so. Indeed for myself I think that contentment and reverential social staus and familial bonds should be awknoleged as highlights of an accomplished man, moreover, perhaps Gabriel will find the zeal of his strength he held superiorly over in his Boyhood that had won him such a gift that is his perfect bride and find something to allowing innocence and dare vulnerability might even arrest him to placate wonder in the female comanion he determined mto be amiss from the lustful romance he so commonly commands and let it guide him to feel that chivalrous dare to give his whole living life to reawaken of his and her homestead. James Joyce may have pinpointed the dismal Terror that comes to stab at the ego of men who find lacking of something they may not yet understand or even have a right right to. Being a man a half month off from the thirty I surmise from the story that what is left in wanting is envy haulting the breaths of working lungs so that we entrap ourselves in a sarcophagus hollowed out by the boyhood reflexes in responses burdened to each member the male sex to always be competing against the other to whatever ends can be streached until collapsing and only to find ourselves buried and anguishing within a coffin that does not fit our still breathing bodies bodies.

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