Summary of Dublinrs

Freddy Malins arrives slightly drunk but not disastrously so. Gabriel goes downstairs to check on him, and Freddy heads into the parlor to talk to the gregarious Mr. Browne. The group assembles to listen to Mary Jane play a difficult piano piece, and Gabriel's mind wanders to his mother, who had opposed his marriage and described Gretta as "country cute." Gabriel remembers how Gretta nursed his mother through her long and ultimately fatal illn

The hour is late; the party is breaking up. Gabriel and Gretta linger, he telling a story about Patrick Morkan, his grandfather, and his horse Johnny. Just as they are about to leave, Gabriel notices Gretta standing solemnly at the top of the stairs, listening to something. Mr. Bartell D'Arcy is singing an old song, "The Lass of Aughrim." At last, Gabriel and Gretta leave, walking through the cold to their hotel. Gabriel is full of joy and happiness about his wife; as he looks at her, he begins to think of scenes from their private life together. They finally find a cab, which takes them to their hotel. Gabriel begins to feel stirrings of desire as he thinks about Gretta; he imagines how he will call her to him when they are alone in their room.

Curiously, for a book of stories that have largely succeeded in laying bare the secret thoughts and feelings of a wide variety of people, the principal theme of "The Dead" is the inscrutability of every other person besides oneself, of the impossibility of ever truly knowing anyone. ("We cannot give ourselves," as Mr. Duffy thought in "A Painful Case," "We are our own.") The dead, obviously, are utterly unknowable; in this story, so are the living. Gretta is hopelessly severed from her dead love Michael Furey, but Gabriel is hopelessly severed from his living wife Gretta. Even after her revelation, he wonders whether she has told him the whole story, insinuating that he suspects that she and Michael Furey may have been lovers. (As he thinks this thought, Gabriel is staring at the heap of Gretta's clothes.) This theme is hinted at when Gabriel is baffled by Miss Ivors's motives; when he is unable to see into his own wife, he is truly beginning to approach the realm "where dwell the vast hosts of the dead," who flicker invisibly in his consciousness. The snow that Gabriel feels falling "through the universe" covers up all of Ireland, the houses of the living and the gravestones of the dead, obscuring names, obscuring features, obscuring every feature. Its opacity is not simply a function of weather; for Gabriel, the snow represents a deep and abiding human truth: the essential loneliness of the soul.

Nearly all the ch

Some topics in this essay:
Michael Furey, Miss Ivors's, Freddy Malins, Malins Browne, Gabriel Gretta, Mary Jane, Aunt Kate, Miss Ivors, Commentary Dead, Misses Morkans', michael furey, snow falling, story book, miss ivors, freddy malins, song lass aughrim, misses morkan, gabriel baffled, tragic epiphany, west briton, bartell d'arcy,