Romance and Reality in "The Dead"

Romance and reality become bitter enemies in James Joyce's short story, "The Dead." Gabriel realizes that his wife is not the woman he thought she was and, as a result, discovers that he is not the man either of them thought he was. Discovering how his wife loved another man caused Gabriel to realize how she did not love him.

Through a distant love that never dies, Gabriel discovers the real Gretta, a woman that was very capable of passionate love but not for Gabriel. When Gretta reveals the pain of losing Michael, Gabriel sees her as if for the first time. After she drifts to sleep, Gabriel "imagines what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty" (Joyce 738). Rachel Billgheimer observes, "Through lust and shallow pleasures he had missed a marriage of close communion and self-sacrifice based on a deep love... Gretta's life had also been moving towards death. Immersed in the memory of the past all these years, she had distanced herself from Gabriel. Each had moved away from the other towards a deadening of the spirit" (Billigheimer). Suddenly his wife had a passionate past that she still carried with her. She is more alive than Gabriel is and the sad thing is that Michael is too. This revelation forces Gabriel to look at himself and he becomes a "ludicrous figure... A nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts" (737). Gabriel is alone in the room with his distant wife and her ghost lover.

The Dead" illustrates how the living can sometimes walk the earth as zombies. Gabriel's epiphany forces him to face the truth of his life rather than living in the lie he concocted many years ago. In doing so, he loses the false security of deception.

Works Cited

Rachel V. Billigheimer. CLA Journal. 1988. GALE Resource Database. Site Accessed December 08, 2008. http://www.infotrac.galegroup.com

Joyce, James. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Cassill, R.V., ed. New York W.W. Norton and Company. 1981.