Joyce's The Dead James Joyce's

Thesis: James Joyce portrays Gabriel Conroy as a man imprisoned by his rational mind and the need to control his world, and can experience love only by having his defenses eroded, after which he experiences compassion for all people living and dead.

I. Gabriel's epiphany comes only after his life's fragments and the differences between himself and others dissolve and unite.

2. The scenes at the party are designed to break down Gabriel's rational control of his world and his mind, step by step.

3. Gabriel is seen by others as competent and in control, but he is a slave to this well-controlled facade.

4. The story of the horse emphasizes Gabriel's lack of sympathy.

5. Gabriel's loss of his final defense begins when he sees his wife moved so deeply by a song. This sight enlivens his lust, but when his lust is thwarted, he learns her longing is aimed at a boy, dead now, who loved her unto death.

6. Jealous at first, Gabriel yields to his wife's overwhelming emotional experience to such an extent that he feels, for perhaps the first time in his life, what another person feels.

7. This surrender, preceded by the party's assault on his defenses, is precisely what Gabriel has needed in order to feel sympathy and compassion for others, all others, living and dead.

8. Ironically, the very shame and foolishness Gabriel has feared with such dread all his adult life are precisely what serve as the means of his emotional and spiritual liberation.

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. Inside, however, he is a mass of controls and levers at which he is constantly working to keep up the facade. He is a man of the mind and has no contact at all with his own gentler feelings. In his speech, he talks about how the modern-day era is not as humane or hospitable or kind or warm-hearted as an earlier era. With respect to the dead, he says in his speech: Listening tonight to the names of all those great singers of the past it seemed to me that we were living in a less spacious age. . . . Let us hope, at least, that in gatherings such as this we shall still speak of [those past days] with pride and affection, still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die (Joyce 438). Gabriel goes on to say that as much as we should honor the past, we should not dwell too much on it, because we have to live in the present. We might have the feeling that Gabriel knows what he is talking about, because what he has to say he says so well. But, as we shall see, he has not really experienced "the dead," nor the living for that matter, as fully as he says. Of course, it is Gabriel himself who is "the dead." He will finally be brought to life by his sympathetic unde

Category: Literature - J