“The Dead” (short story) in James Joyce’s Dubliners (collection of short stories): "The Dead" is the final short story in the 1914 collection Dubliners by James Joyce. It is the longest story in the collection and is often considered the best of Joyce's shorter works. At 15,672 words it has also been considered a novella. It was made into a film also entitled The Dead in 1987, directed by John Huston. In 1999 it was adapted into a musical by Richard Nelson and Shaun Davey. Christopher Walken starred in the original production. In "The Dead" Joyce depicts a complicated marriage filled with secrets, but also with love. The story centres on Gabriel Conroy on the night of the Morkan sisters' annual dance and dinner in the first week of January 1904, perhaps the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6). Typical of the stories in Dubliners, "The Dead" develops toward a moment of painful selfawareness; Joyce described this as an epiphany. The narrative generally concentrates on Gabriel's insecurities, his social awkwardness, and the defensive way he copes with his discomfort. The story culminates at the point when Gabriel discovers that, through years of marriage, there was much he never knew of his wife's past. About the author: James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in a suburb of Dublin. He was one of twelve children raised in poverty by a father who wasted the family fortunes and a mother who died at the age of forty-four. At the age of six, Joyce was sent to a Jesuit boarding school, Clongowes Wood College. In 1902, he graduated from University College in Dublin, where he studied foreign languages and philosophy. Immediately after graduation, Joyce left Dublin to study medicine in Paris, but he returned to Ireland in 1903 to see his dying mother. In June 1904 he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle, and they moved to Trieste and then Zurich, where he taught languages at the Berlitz School. They had two children—Giorgio, born in 1905, and Lucia, born in 1907. Joyce's first major work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel published in serial form beginning in 1914, established his literary reputation. The book was ground-breaking in its form, depicting the growth of an Irish Catholic boy solely through the consciousness of the narrator. Joyce also published a collection of short stories, Dubliners, that same year, and began work on what many critics consider his crowning achievement, Ulysses. Finally published in 1922, Ulysses earned Joyce charges of obscenity and did not appear in an American edition until 1934. The novel, which loosely follows the structure of Homer's Odyssey, traces one day in the lives of Stephen Dedalus, the hero of Portrait, and Leopold and Molly Bloom, a Dublin couple. Encyclopaedic in both its use of narrative techniques and its attention to the details of everyday life, Ulysses redefined the novel as a genre. In 1939, Joyce completed his last book, Finnegan’s Wake, a radical, extravagant experiment in language and narrative. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941. Download a copy of “The Dead” here: http://gutenberg.org/ebooks/2814 Watch the film adaptation here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVJc9fzqAcI Other interesting information: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/dec/02/stage
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