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“The Dead” and the Generosity of the Word

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Vincent P. Pecora
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Abstract

Readers of Dubliners are usually well prepared for a leap out of the suffocating world Joyce displays there, for a promise, however ambiguous or mundane, of escape. But in a story like “The Dead” the production of a desire for escape at all costs may be the crucial interpretive problem, for it inevitably stimulates our mystified identification at the end with a character whose apparent awakening is itself socially conditioned. Unless interpretation radically reevaluates the cultural codification of reflective consciousness, we remain locked within a Christian paradigm of self-knowledge as truth that transcends material oppositions through selflessness—through the insistent generosity that punctuates this story. Gabriel's concluding “insight” and humility may then only reproduce an ideology that Joyce cruelly traces throughout bourgeois Dublin life: to escape his constant humiliation by others, Gabriel must finally humiliate himself.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 101 , Issue 2 , March 1986 , pp. 233 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1986

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