Between 1916 and 1922 especially, Ireland underwent a tremendously traumatic introduction to modernity: that of its colonized societies. Unfortunately, this type of modernisation was one intrinsically linked with the culture of the colonising force, in this case, the English. This led to the colonised people - the Irish - though desiring modernity and its benefits, wanting them only on their own terms. Anti-colonial nationalism and decolonisation was what followed in the early twentieth century, bringing with it its own set of problems.
However, the common perception of Joycean modernism and Irish nationalism as being poles apart is inaccurate, since there are, in fact, distinct analogies between the two. As Emer Nolan tells us:.
Nationalism seeks to recreate a sense of traditional community within contemporary mass culture: modernist writing exploits the relentless energy of commercial civilization, but it may also record or lament the progressive abolition of local difference in the modern world.
(Nolan, 1995:xii).
Many critics have tried to read Joyce whilst excluding the influence of Irish historical experience that informs his work, and this has a distortive effect on their whole interpretation, by their insistence on reading "Ireland" through Joyce and Joyce as "Irishman" (Joyce was, instead, an emigrant Irishman).
Other themes that run through the story as a whole act like sub-texts to the themes already described. They mainly exist in the form of binary opposites, which each relate to the central theme of paralysis that pervades the entire collection, culminating in The Dead. These are the themes of death/life; old age/youth; cold/heat; outdoors/indoors; past/present and West/East, the first of each pair being the main overriding factor that dominates the two. This fact shows that The Dead incorporates many of the preoccupations which mastered Joyce: namely his fascination with regard to the dead and the hold they often appear to have over the living; sexual jealousy regarding those that had associated with his wife before him, and, predominantly, his sense of inadequacy and vulnerability.