Many years ago—decades in fact—when I became a Catholic, the wonderful trio of days that comprise All Hallow’s Eve, All Saints’ Day, and The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls’ Day) were for me essentially aesthetic. The liturgies and litanies were beautiful, the musical settings and choral performances were transcendent, and the days passed in a blend of sentiment and whimsy. Cloaked in what I now recognize as false piety, I frequented special liturgies at the cathedral and other parishes, happy to be alive and solemnly nodding for those who were not. 

Then I met my future wife, and her beloved grandmother died. Then we married, and her other beloved grandmother died, with us at her side and our unborn son in my wife’s womb. And then my father died. 

My father’s death nearly 20 years ago changed forever my piety about mortality. My mother’s death a few years ago solidified it. We are born, we live, we die. It all happens so quickly that without faith, the entire process would be absurd. As a Catholic Christian, I can’t accept—and you can’t accept—that we enter this world out of nothing and return to nothing. There must be a purpose and meaning, not only to life, but also in the mystery of death. 

As a professor of literature and film, I return repeatedly to certain texts for insight, comfort, and affirmation. Among all the works that I frequently revisit, James Joyce’s story “The Dead” is one that means most to me, particularly at this time of year. 

“The Dead” is the last story that Joyce wrote for his brilliant collection of stories “Dubliners,” which was published in 1914, several years after the book had been written. T.S. Eliot called it one of the very best short stories in the English language, and well over a hundred years later, it remains so. 

The story—a long one in which not much happens—baffles many readers upon first encounter. Yet subsequent readings reveal a depth and complexity that is both mysterious and comforting. 

Author James Joyce plays the guitar in this photo taken in 1915, the year after his work “The Dead” was published. Photo by Ottocaro Weiss

Like many of the stories in Dubliners, “The Dead” contains autobiographical elements, yet while most of the other works in the book reflect Joyce’s harshly unsentimental view of Irish society, “The Dead” reveals a warm affection for Irish values of family, faith, and hospitality. Joyce purposely tried to soften his attitudes toward his homeland by drawing upon pleasant childhood memories. At the same time, the story achieves the greatest realization of human experience. In “The Dead,” Dublin transcends the local or specific to become universal. 

Moving toward an epiphany 

The story takes place on Twelfth Night, or Epiphany, at a party held by the aging Morkan sisters, Kate and Julia. It is a small but lavish affair in which a few friends and family gather for the last celebration of the Christmas season. Among the guests are a cross-section of Irish life. There is Molly Ivors, a staunchly nationalist Irish patriot. Mr. Browne is the only Protestant at the party; he reflects both ignorance and bemusement in his questions about the other guests’ Catholicism. Bartell D’Arcy is a singer of sentimental Irish folk songs and ballads. Freddy Malins is an alcoholic, a doomed but sweet soul who reflects more sincerity and empathy than anyone else in the story. Lily, the caretaker, oversees all the proceedings with fuss and bluster. 

The two primary characters, however, are a married couple, Gretta and Gabriel Conroy. Gabriel is a dilletante, a stuffy Anglophile adored by his aunts Kate and Julia, who fail to see the real nature of their pedantic nephew. In a wonderful example of irony, the Morkans ask Gabriel to deliver a speech at the dinner table. Yet this Gabriel has nothing at all to announce. In the end, his address is a string of empty cliches and sentiment—the very sort of jingoism that Joyce abhorred about Ireland. 

Gabriel frets and worries over his speech so much that he can hardly enjoy the party. When he’s not obsessing over his presentation, he silently mocks and derides the other guests until he himself is mocked by Molly Ivors, who calls him a “West Briton” because of his Anglophilia. 

Gretta is warm and polite, the model wife and guest. Yet Gretta’s deep past is stirred, then enflamed by a song she hears Bartell D’Arcy sing near the end of the party. “The Lass of Aughrim” reminds Gretta of her first great love, a boy named Michael Furey, who died—perhaps for her—at age 17. 

Almost all the story takes place at the Morkans’ party. In the final pages, however, when Gretta and Gabriel arrive at their hotel room, the story erupts—almost explodes—into a storm of emotion and realization. 

The ghost of Michael Furey becomes one of the only characters in the story who is actually living. He comes out of the past as if beckoned, and in her memories of her young love for him, Gretta breaks down. She tells Gabriel that one cold and rainy night, when Michael was sick and she was away at school, that the boy visited her. The damp worsened his illness, and he died soon after. It is clear in the story that Gretta never really abandoned her love for him. Collapsing in heartache, she sobs herself to sleep, while her astonished husband feels only shame and resentment. 

If we understand at the end of the story that Michael, in the Communion of Saints, is very much alive, we also realize that Gabriel is spiritually dead. Together, both men—young and old—give the story its title. Michael Furey is the dead man who reflects the past’s constant presence, while Gabriel is the walking dead man who has never really lived. Consider this sad realization: “Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself toward any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love.” 

Kate and Julia Morkan also contribute to the title. As Gabriel begins moving toward his own epiphany, he imagines the inevitable funerals that are coming soon for his elderly aunts. “He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console and would find only lame and useless ones.”   

This vision, along with his awareness of Michael Furey, and his own pitiful narcissism lead Gabriel to understand at last that “One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” 

Thus, Gabriel arrives at his “Joycean Epiphany,” the device that concludes almost all the great stories in Dubliners. It is what Flannery O’Connor understood as a moment of Grace, a flashing revelation of our real place in the world, a material world that is always linked to the spiritual. In a drab Dublin hotel room, on a night when snow blankets and muffles the land, Gabriel Conroy at last understands his place in the Communion of Saints. In beautiful prose, Joyce writes:  

“Snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling over every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted upon the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe, and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” 

Effectively adapting that language to another medium is almost impossible, but the great filmmaker John Huston comes close in his last film, “The Dead,” which beautifully translates the story for cinema. Working with his children—daughter Angelica plays Gretta, and son Tony wrote the screenplay—and sick unto death with an oxygen tank and a wheelchair, Huston crafts one of the finest literary adaptations ever made. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t entirely capture the spiritual subtext and epiphany, but the film’s deep affection for place and character is obvious, and the movie is a valuable counterpart to the story. The film will finally be properly released on home video by Criterion in January, almost 120 years after the story’s composition.