“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.”

Enjoy the discussion

Kate asks in her post who are the dead the title of ths story refers to? I’ve been thinking about it and am going to toss out a few ideas.

At first I thought the dead were the dead Gabriel refers to in his speech at supper, previous generations and the singers that they talked about while they ate. Then I thought the dead was Michael Furey. But ultimately, I wonder if the dead aren’t really all of them, all the people who have died, not just anyone specifically? They are not gone but have a “wayward and flickering existence” which depends on our memory of them. They flicker into reality when they are recalled to us in unexpected moments. The rest of the time they seem to just kind of wait in an unnamed place. The dead might be gone from the solid world, but they still have an effect on us. And then, of course, someday we will be dead too. I think there is more, different ideas of what dead is, but I can’t get to it just yet.

What about the Irish themselves? Whose culutre has by this time been assimilated into English culture so completely as to have been all but interred? What about that era in Dublin of “nice” social gatherings, and the deep dissonance between what is felt and what is said in polite society? What about the death of our narrator and perhaps the author himself, in looking on at a world not his own?

To me, the dead are all the things that are lost to us, including our earlier selves, the self that loved Michael Furey, in the story, and the face that “was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death.” The entire past.  The story captures Gretta’s sense of the loss of her young love, and Gabriel’s complete lack of knowledge of it, the moment when he realizes he can’t possibly know his wife fully. And so much else! Amazing story.