.
We also have criticism of the church, as Aunt Kate speaks bitterly of the decision of Pope Pius X to exclude women from all church choirs. Aunt Julia had dedicated a great deal of her life to working in the choir, and her thanks for it is the Pope's appallingly sexist decision. Aunt Kate says repeatedly that of course the Pope must be right about everything, but she cannot help but think it was ungrateful. We see in her the inability to reconcile what she knows to be wrong with the indoctrinated Catholic conviction that the Pope cannot be wrong. The irreverence of Joyce's depiction of Epiphany Day is the crucial element of The Dead and a reminder that it is a spiritual death that is at the core of the paralytic condition of which the Catholic church is the main cause.We see also the political divisions in Ireland in the conversation between Miss Ivors and Gabriel. We see glimpses of poverty, in the character of Lily, whose family is achingly poor. (gradesaver.com) Mortality is a key part of the story, beginning with its title. The tale is set in winter, which is both holiday season and the season of death.
The separation of death becomes a metaphor for the separation between the living. Joyce joins the themes of isolation and mortality. Gabriel feels himself becoming one of the deceased: "His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead" (224). The snow, falling upon "all the living and the dead" becomes a metaphor for isolation, the inability to know others, even those with whom we are intimate. Ironically, the snow also functions as a symbol for the death that comes indiscriminately opaque where it lies "thickly drifted" over objects in cities and distant graveyards, it masks all behind a shield of white, isolating each thing, while also reminding Gabriel that the same mortality awaits all beings. (Dyson:236).
Joyce presents the world of Dubliners as the human condition, and it is a pretty bleak vision, that condition, one of thinking oneself to fall short of a kind of idealisation which is possible only when unrealised, like Michael Furey.
