James Joyce\'s Short Story \"The

James Joyce's short story "The Dead" simultaneously idealizes and deflates romantic ideals. On one hand, Gretta's description of Michael Furey, and how he died for her love, is shocking and heartbreaking. Gretta has clearly been keeping this memory alive within her heart for many years, and has been unable to share it with anyone. Unlike the 'Furey' of Michael's passion, her marriage with Gabriel is staid and uneventful. Although Gabriel does appreciate his wife, as much as he is capable of doing in his emotionally stunted way, the vividness of her memory seems to indicate that she knows she lost something vital and important, when she lost Michael. Gretta's presence in the story embodies the importance of passion in human existence and the sad possibility that two married people can live together, without really communicating or knowing one another. Without passionate love, Joyce suggests, even the living have the qualities of the dead. Gretta's revelation about love stands in stark contrast to Gabriel's taunting of the working-class Lily about her romantic life.

While Gretta's reminiscing seems to elevate romance, read in its entirety, the story underlines the impermanent nature of all human emotions, including love. Gabriel feels psychologically bolstered by the apparently positive reception of his elaborate toast at Miss Kate and Miss Julia's house. His confidence quickly evaporates in the face of Gretta's speech. However, rather than take the side of a single character, Joyce instead seems to suggest that all of the characters are obsessed with transient ideals. Gabriel likes to envision himself as 'above' the common order of people, which is one of the reasons he obsesses over his toast -- he wants to make sure that everyone can understand what he says, and believes he is much more erudite than his listeners. But Joyce suggests at the end of the story that regardless of one is intellectual, political, or romantic in one's sensibilities, everyone ends in the same place as Michael Furey. "Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse," realizes Gabriel. He also realizes that his wife and he are not getting any younger -- he observes her face is not the face Michael Furey died to see.

Rather than regain his belief in the value of romance, Gabriel has a deeper revelation: he comes to recognize how little he knows about the human character and the fact that he does not love his wife as deeply as Michael Furey: "Perhaps she had not told him all the story. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live. Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love."