Life of James Joyce

James Joyce's short story "The Dead" is both one of his most transparent works - at least in terms of its literary style - and one of his most opaque, for the story's message is ambiguous. Joyce, the product of Jesuit schools and a conventionally pious family, spent much at least of his literary life rebelling against Irish Catholicism, but in this story he returns to some of the central messages of his faith, which is the idea that we are capable of - and even perhaps necessarily subject to - rebirth, and that the key to our being reborn and so saved is our ability to forgive and - even beyond forgiveness - to see the connections between oneself and the rest of humanity. Joyce is not, of course, following strict Catholic dogma here, for he is essentially granting to each one of us what Church teachings would grant only to Christ: The power to endow grace through forgiveness. Joyce's Gabriel learns that the sacrifice of looking beyond oneself grants grace, and so becomes both angelic and godlike, so becomes full of grace through fully human means. Joyce takes an essentially Catholic idea and transforms it into a humanistic one, and it is not clear whether he means to do so as rebellion or reverence.

Joyce's background would suggest that the writer was always more inclined to rebellion. A brief overview of that background is useful in understanding his work in general as a writer and in particular the literary and psychological distance traveled in "The Dead".

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's later abandonment of straightforward storytelling techniques in his novels provides an impetus to examine his short stories from the same perspective, to see the ways in which Joyce chooses to tell a story that seems to progress but in fact is gradually falling apart around both the reader and the narrative. This sense of the center not being able to hold is present in "The Dead", as is the sense that Joyce does not mind so very much if things fall apart. For he is not, after, very much like his compatriot W. B. Yeats, that fierce Irish nationalist who could see a way through the clouds of history and biography to a brighter future. Yeats often saw the world falling apart, but he also saw the mechanism to put it back together. Joyce - especially in his later works - saw the world falling apart and did not see faith or God or country as being able to put it back together. Humanity he still has some faith in "The Dead", still some sense of the potency of love and compassion, but this sense fades in and out of his later works (Bloom, 1985, p. 88). Joyce employed symbols to create what he called an "epiphany," the revelation of certain inner qualities both in his later major works like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and in his short s

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