The Dead

To Gabriel Conroy, the world is an unknowable place. He is an insular man who focuses on his own interests and travails over everyone else. Gabriel struggles to relate to others, which makes his social interactions difficult and awkward. When he first arrives at the party, for instance, he stumbles through a conversation with Lily about her love life and only seems to placate his anxieties by giving her a large tip. From there, he dances with Miss Ivors and struggles to keep up with her gentle teasing. He takes her comments about his lack of patriotism to heart, feeling as though she has attacked his identity. He retreats to the corner of the room and scowls at the interaction, then silently worries that his awkwardness is the reason why she leaves so early. Even when he plans his speech, he worries that the other guests will not understand his literary references. Rather than make changes, however, Gabriel simply worries. He is so insular and focused on himself that he cannot imagine the minds or motivations of others. He keeps his emotions bottled up and hidden, assuming that everyone else is doing the same to him.

To some extent, Gabriel is not wrong. Other people do guard dark secrets, and the tragedies of their lives are only subtly hinted at through subtext. Freddy Malins arrives drunk and late to the party, and his loud, boisterous laughter is a distraction to the hosts and the other guests. But the description of his laughter hints at the bronchitis which might be plaguing Freddy’s lungs. He is loud, he is annoying, he is carrying a host of personal demons, but the image of jovial energy he projects to the guests is undercut by serious questions regarding his health. Gabriel never knows whether Freddy is sick. He never makes any attempt to understand Freddy’s health, nor the reasons for his heavy drinking. To Gabriel, Freddy seems like an impenetrable person and, in this respect, Freddy offers no reason to the contrary. The guests have their inner, private lives and guard these rigorously.

Gabriel is forced to confront this issue when he realizes that his wife carries a more tragic burden than he ever realized. Gabriel prided himself on knowing his wife so well, joking with his aunts about her bad habits as soon as he arrived at the party. To Gabriel, these bad habits were a secret about Gretta that only he knew, and he enjoyed being the one to reveal the unknown aspect of Gretta to the world. When she tells him about Michael Furey, however, he is forced to reckon with the reality that he does not understand his wife nearly as well as he thinks. That she should hide such a painful, formative memory makes him worry that he might have missed something else in her life. The Gretta he thought he knew no longer exists. Instead, this new version of Gretta defies his security and his understanding. Gabriel is an insular person who is forced to confront the consequences of such insularity. He is confronted with the unknowable, impenetrable reality of human beings and made to learn radical empathy. Just as the story ends, Gabriel begins to extend his understanding of the world beyond himself to the island as a whole.

The lives of the characters in “The Dead” are shaped by death. The hosts of the party are two aunts who have taken their niece into their care following the death of her parents. The relationship between the hosts is shaped by death in this sense, throwing together people in a way which defies the conventional family dynamic. As such, the guests who attend the party are entering a space which has been shaped and curated by the absence of life. The guests exist in the close proximity of death, all aware of the clear absences of certain people, but they refrain from discussing these losses. Death shapes their conversation through its notable absence; just like Mary Jane’s parents are notable because of their unspoken absence from the party, the conversation is notable because of the unspoken absence of death. Indeed, all mentions of death and loss are relegated to the narration and rarely, if ever, mentioned in dialogue. The focus on life and the determined ignorance of death throws the subject into sharp relief. No one wants to discuss death, despite its clear presence, making the subject all the more distinct.

As Gabriel discovers, the contours of Gretta’s life and personality are shaped by her experience of death. She explains to Gabriel that she feels guilty about the death of Michael Furey, who sang to her on a cold day when he was already sick. She blames herself, as though Michael sacrificed his life on the altar of their potential, unrealized love. To Gretta, every romantic relationship is an echo of that first one; her current personality is a result of her bottling up her emotions and not sharing them. This guilt and fear are carried by Gretta; she never tells people about her tragedy, meaning that her quiet, unassuming personality is shaped by her sense of loss. When she finally does, she breaks down in tears. She is weeping with catharsis, mourning the loss of Michael as well as her old self, the person who bottled up her emotion and told no one. At last, Gretta is able to sleep because she knows that she will wake up as someone else. Her life will be different, now informed but not dictated by death.

Gabriel is shocked by Gretta’s revelation. As well as the implications of his own character, her confession changes the way he thinks about the relationship between the living and the dead. Gabriel rarely thinks about the dead. Even when he thinks about his own deceased mother, he does so in the context of the living Gretta caring for her in her last days. Gabriel separates the living and the dead into separate worlds, confining the dead to the immutable past. But Gretta’s words change his perspective. As he watches the snow fall outside, he realizes that the living and the dead both exist at the same time. Death informs life and vice versa. They should not be considered separate, but together as two parts of the same vibrant existence. The snow falls on the graves of the dead, just as it falls on the streets of the living. Life and death, Gabriel realizes, are as relevant and as important as each other.