Gabriel's Artistic Development in the Face of Death in James Joyce's Short Story "The Dead" (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, LMU Munich, language: English, abstract: Reading essays on James Joyce's short story "The Dead", one is immediately confronted with the most different interpretations of its end as it is very different from the rest of the text and can even be seen as poetic. Apparently Gabriel's epiphany is of prime importance to the readers of James Joyce. This term paper shall answer the question why this is the case. Therefore it is necessary to comprehend the extreme development of Gabriel within the story. This work claims that Gabriel, rather self-centred at the beginning, develops into an understanding artist towards the end of the story when he is somehow challenged by the dead after his wife's revelation.
As the title of the short story already reveals, death plays a huge role in the text, especially when causing Gabriel's final enlightenment. To prove this thesis, first of all allusions to death in the text shall be found and interpreted as they function as framework for the gloomy core revealed at the end and thereby pave the way to Gabriel's aesthetic development. Then the main character shall be examined on his artistic premises before the turning point signifies a change in his aesthetic views. In the last chapter Gabriel's transformation into an artist shall be elucidated more precisely with an emphasis put on his changing reception of the omnipresent snow transferring into a poetical symbol of death. The snow motive connects art and death and therefore anticipates the aesthetic transformation in the views of the main character towards the much discussed end of the short story.