e in control of every personal and social situation, but by a profound, spiritual sympathy and compassion for all beings, living and dead:
James Joyce's "The Dead" culminates in Gabriel Conroy's timeless moment of almost supreme vision. The fragments of his life's experiences . . . are fused together into a whole. . . . Initiated by a moment of deep, if localized, sympathy, his vision and this sympathy expand together to include not only himself, Gretta, and his aunts, but all Ireland, and . . . "all the living and all the dead," all humanity (Loomis 100).
Gerald Doherty focuses on the significance of "differences" in the story, or "antitheses." The most important "difference" in the story is the difference between Gabriel and all around him, living and dead. Gabriel is alienated from the world and from human beings, and it is the wearing down of his defenses throughout the story that leads him to experience the emotional and spiritual epiphany which "dissolves" both the "solid world" (Doherty 225) and his desire to control that world and everyone in it. The wall imposing the difference between Gabriel and others comes crashing down. Doherty examines the symbolic role of the snow in this process:
In "The Dead" the snow configuration . . . breaches the wall that keeps traditional oppositions apart, collapsing differences, fusing domains-
...