... uneventful.¹

Copyright 1986 by Jeffery Triggs. All rights reserved.

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... 62).²

One might add to these names those of James R. Baker and Lionel Trilling. Baker, comparing Joyce and Ibsen, sees the stories in Dubliners including ``The Dead'' as sharing a ``common pattern ... Dublin is the realm of the living-dead, paralysis exists on every level of experience and at every stage of life'' (67). Trilling, perhaps echoing his own concerns, writes that ``Gabriel Conroy's plight, his sense that he has been overtaken by death-in-life, is shared by many in our time'' (156). Both these writers, however, Trilling genially and Baker somewhat less so, impose on Joyce the coloring of outside concerns, fitting him to the mold of Ibsen or an ``adversary'' literature.

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... successful.³

Of course ``The Dead'' is also ``autobiographical'' in the sense that Joyce based his characters on people he knew, his family, friends, and himself, but no character has the special personal relevance of Stephen Dedalus, originally conceived as ``Stephen Hero,'' and only later subjected to distancing irony in Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses. Ellman believes that while Gretta is fairly obviously based on Nora Barnacle, and the Misses Morkan on Joyce's own great-aunts, the character of Gabriel is actually a composite of Joyce himself, his father John Joyce, and a friend named Constantine Curran, whose brother was a priest like Gabriel's brother Constantine (James Joyce 1959). Harry Levin describes Gabriel as ``a Stephen Dedalus who stayed on to teach school and write occasional reviews'' (42). That fact that Gabriel is only partially autobiographical can explain both Joyce's sympathy for and detection of his character in ``The Dead.''

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... boots,⁴

The flicking of snow from Gabriel's boots has also been seen by critics like Allen Tate (408) and Kenneth Burke (410) as an early suggestion of death, the first appearance of the snow symbolism that comes gradually to dominate the story.

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