Example Literary Research Paper

Michelle Carerra
Professor Krickstein
English 1302
October 15, 2004

The Awakening of Gabriel Conroy

Like the stories in Dubliners that lead up to it, “The Dead” dramatizes a moment of self-realization. The story portrays the gradual awakening of Gabriel Conroy, whose vision of his wife, Gretta, at the end of the story is at once a frustrating disappointment and a touching movement toward understanding and love. Robert Adams voices the view of more than one critic when he writes of “The Dead” that this “greatest of the stories in Dubliners stands apart from the rest, being warmer in tonality, richer in the writing, and more intimate in its subject matter” (83). Florence Walzl agrees when she writes that “’The Dead’ is markedly different from the earlier stories. . . .It is not only a longer, more fully developed narrative, but it presents a more kindly view of Ireland” (428). In one sense the “dead” of the title are all those who have lived and died, those who have gone before the festive inhabitants of Dublin who celebrate the Christmas season, Gabriel Conroy and Gretta among them. In another sense the dead are all those who, though alive and breathing, have lost their naturalness, their spontaneity, and most importantly, their passion. Gabriel, one of these, has lost touch with his past and with traditional Irish values. He looks instead toward continental Europe, toward the future, and toward change for an escape from the outmoded and restrictive attitudes of the past (Ellmann 395). We glimpse Gabriel arriving at the party as a man coming in from the dark, here the symbolic darkness of Gabriel’s ignorance (Walzl 433). Gabriel appears to be something of a generous gentleman, as he slips a coin into the hand of the servant Lily. With this gesture of holiday good will, Gabriel attempts to buy his way out of further conversation with Lily, but she makes him uncomfortable by commenting that “The men that is now is all palaver and what they can get out of you.” It is a remark, Joyce’s narrator notes that Lily delivers “with great bitterness” (Joyce 178). Gabriel deflects further discussion by attending to his coat and scarf and shoes. He then presses the tip into the girl’s hand and disappears up the stairs. Our first impression of Gabriel is of someone who though cultivated and cultured, is nonetheless naïve. This small scene sets the tone for Gabriel’s more serious errors in understanding, which Joyce saves for a later revelation. Early in the story, Gabriel is distinguished from his wife, Gretta, his emotional opposite. Gabriel describes his wife as someone who would walk home in the snow if she were allowed to do so. Gabriel, on the other hand, will not go out in snow or rain without his galoshes. Unlike her more cultured husband, Gretta is without pretension, and she is more spontaneous. She retains the youthful romantic nature she possessed when a young man named Michael Furey died, according to her version of the event, for love of her. Even in middle age, Gretta appears more comfortable with the memory of the boy from her past than with the presence of her more cultivated husband. Gabriel’s difference from the others at the party is revealed during a conversation with Miss Ivors. When Miss Ivors suggests that Gabriel and Gretta accompany her and some friends on a vacation to the primitive Irish-speaking Aryan islands off the western coast of Ireland, Gabriel does not accept. He tells her that he has already planned to travel in the other direction—east to France and Belgium. These countries represent for Gabriel the world of culture and civilization. The Irish islands, by contrast, represent what he considers uncivilized and repugnant. Ironically, however, his wife’s family come from one of those islands—a fact that Gabriel prefers to ignore. During his conversation with Miss Ivors, Gabriel confesses his disgust with Ireland this way: “O, to tell you the truth . . . I’m sick of my own country, sick of it” (189). When pressed for an explanation, however, Gabriel declines to provide one. He feels superior to his ignorant countrymen, and is out of sympathy with their restrictive political, religious, and cultural values. To say so, however, would be distasteful and uncomfortable. It would also be discourteous. And so Gabriel is silent. Other important scenes put Gabriel on display, increasing our perception of him as more concerned with surface than with substance, more impressed by the sound of his own voice than the truth of his words or the value of his actions. Gabriel’s clichéd after-dinner speech, for example, is filled with outlandish praise of his old aunts, whom he flatters beyond their comprehension. Gabriel sees the old Irish past as dead, paying it only a token and insincere tribute. His thoughts and energies are directed elsewhere—to the future and to the Continent. Yet Gabriel points ironically toward what seems most true—the power of the past to continue living into the future; the inability of individuals to completely escape their past and their cultural roots. In rejecting those things, Gabriel is rejecting the essential part of himself. It is unclear how much of this he understands. At the time he gives his speech, however, it seems clear that he believes none of his lofty sentiments. We begin to see just how much Gabriel is shut out of his wife’s inner life in still another scene at the party. After dinner there is singing by Mr. Darcy. When he sings an Irish ballad called “The Lass of Aughrim,” Gretta listens enraptured, lost in memory: She was standing right under the dusty fanlight and the flame of the gas lit up the rich bronze of her hair which he had seen her drying at the fire a few days before. She was in the same attitude and seemed unaware of the talk about her. At last she turned toward them and Gabriel saw that there was color on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining. (212) At this moment Gabriel feels an immense tenderness toward his wife and also a strong sexual desire for her. Both his tenderness and his desire grow as the party winds down and Gabriel accompanies Gretta to the hotel. Gabriel’s desire increases further as he rehearses mentally how he will approach Gretta and how he will express his feelings. The critical point of this scene concerns the thoughts Gretta has as Gabriel watches her. He expects her to tell him that she has been thinking of him and of their life together. Instead, she tells Gabriel about Michael Furey, whose image she had conjured up when Mr. Darcy sang “The Lass of Aughrim,” a song Michael Furey himself sang before he died. As Gabriel listens to Gretta reminisce about the poor delicate boy with the big sad eyes, he experiences with a shock a moment of self-realization: Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead. (219-20) Gabriel’s humiliation is increased further when he learns the circumstances of Michael Furey’s death. With that knowledge comes a second revelation accompanied by Joyce’s description of the snow falling over all of Ireland. The beauty of the language, which matches the beauty of the snow-filled scene, also suggests the beauty of Gabriel’s perception that all people share life and death, that the dead live and the living shall joing the dead in a shared humanity. “The time had come,” as the narrator puts it, “for Gabriel to set out on his journey westward” (223), a statement that has been characterized as “an enigmatic sentence that has bothered many readers of ‘The Dead.’” (Benstock 167). But, as Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann has explained (396), it is not really so puzzling. According to Ellmann, this westward journey is the journey back to Gabriel’s past, to his cultural roots. The tone of Joyce’s sentence suggests resignation and relinquishment, as Gabriel gives up his “sense of the importance of civilized thinking, of Continental tastes” (Ellmann 397) and other nice distinctions he prides himself in making. Moreover, this journey westward is also the ultimate journey toward the setting sun, toward the closing of life. For Gabriel, the journey toward what he previously saw as death is really a journey into life, the real life of feeling as experienced by those more sincere and authentic than he has ever been. For although Gabriel Conroy had indeed been sick of his country, as he had told Miss Ivors, he nevertheless finds himself drawn to it. The story, ultimately, turns on a paradox: that to go forward one has to go back. Gabriel’s soul swoons as he hears the snow “falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (224). Finally, during Gabriel’s vision, Joyce slows down the narrative pace (Loomis 150). Time slows as we are presented a vision of humanity’s common fate. It is a vision that we share rather than one we simply analyze. For we too know that like Gabriel and Gretta and Michael Furey, everyone is subject to the experiences of love and sorrow, pain and joy, passion and tenderness, living and dying. And, like Gabriel, is realizing and reminding ourselves of the inevitability of this simple truth, our sympathies are enlarged and deepened for Gabriel, for Gretta, for Michael Furey, and for one another as well.

Works Cited
Adams, Robert. James Joyce. NY: Octagon, 1980.
Benstock, Bernard. “The Dead.” Dubliners: Critical Essays. Ed. Clive Hart. London: Faber, 1969. 156-69.
Ellmann, Richard. “The Backgrounds of ‘The Dead.’” Scholes and Litz 388-403.
Joyce, James. “The Dead.” Scholes and Litz 175-224.
Loomis, C. C. “Structure and Sympathy in Joyce’s ‘The Dead.’” PMLA 75 (1960): 149-51.
Walzl, Florence. “Gabriel and Michael: The Conclusion of ‘The Dead.’” Scholes and Litz 423-79.
Scholes, Robert and A. Walton Litz, eds., Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes. NY: Viking, 1969.