Gabriel “watched her while she slept” and “his curious eyes rested upon her face.” The story “The Dead” by James Joyce allows the character of Gabriel to be unveiled through the implementation of literary techniques such as motif and symbolism among others.
The author heavily implements he use of symbolism throughout the short story in order to provide the reader with a system to communicate Gabriel’s feelings. He begins by mentioning that his wife is asleep, and then he goes in depth by describing what Gabriel notices about her. It is mentioned in the paragraph that “he watched her while she slept as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife.” It can be drawn from this quote that the author meant to emphasize the feeling of emptiness that Gabriel felt next to his significant other. Furthermore, it is mentioned that Gabriel wondered what it would be like to have lover her in an earlier time in her life. The author writes that “he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of girlish beauty” because he wants the readers to …show more content…
Throughout the story, Gabriel is haunted by the thoughts of his wife’s lack of love for him, yet he is aware of the previous love story his wife had lived before she gave him her hand in matrimony. Knowing that her one true love had passed away, he was deeply affected by the departure of the confidence that once resided within his marriage. The motif of death plays a major role by bringing his observations of his wife’s unhappiness, for he notices that she does not possess her “girlish beauty”; she has not had the same light in her eyes as she did when she was with Michael, for she truly loved him, and his death affected her tremendously. Within the story, death is grafted in order to bring attention to the side effects and the grief it presents to those who lived to suffer by