Not only Gabriel but his entire homeland has been paralyzed, Joyce is saying (or, more precisely, revealing).

Thus, when Gabriel enters his aunts' party, 'A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toecaps on the toes of his galoshes and, as the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-stiffened frieze, a cold fragrant air from out-of-doors escaped from crevices and folds.' The symbolism returns at story's end, in the justly famous final paragraphs describing a snow-covered Ireland. In this story, paralysis is represented as usual by the colors yellow and brown, but Joyce also employs the symbolism of snow and ice after all, if something is frozen, it is motionless - paralyzed. This accounts for his excitement at story's end when he believes that Gretta's passion relates to him and them, as their marriage has decayed badly over the years. Gabriel's marriage is clearly suffering from paralysis, the condition of nearly all the characters in the collection. The story reiterates the great themes of Dubliners. (He would follow this book with A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.) He feels alone and profoundly mortal, but spiritually connected for the first time with others.īy general consensus, this is the greatest of all the stories in Dubliners - the longest, richest, and most emotionally affecting - and the story more than any other that points toward Joyce's career as one of the English language's greatest novelists ever. Gabriel realizes that she has never felt similarly passionate about their marriage. In a hotel room later, Gabriel is devastated to discover that he has misunderstood Gretta's feelings she has been moved by the memory of a young lover named Michael Furey who preceded Gabriel, and who died for the love of Gretta. As the party is breaking up, Gabriel witnesses his wife, Gretta, listening to a song sung by the renowned tenor Bartell D'Arcy, and the intensity of her focus on the music causes him to feel both sentimental and lustful. A professor and part-time book reviewer named Gabriel Conroy attends a Christmastime party thrown by his aunts ( Kate and Julia Morkin, grand dames in the world of Dublin music) at which he dances with a fellow teacher and delivers a brief speech.

The dead dubliners summary