Reading Journal _ "The Dead"

“All the living and the dead” were “in for a night.” The Misses Morkan’s annual dance was a fully accompanied one, with everybody who knew them coming. Along with the food and the well-decorated house, the party was quite elegant and grand. However, what should have been a lively gathering seemed to be rather dead.

The Old Square Piano

The guests were old, with Julia and Kate, the hosts, being no exception. The piano, a somewhat central entertainer of the party, was an old square one, too. Mr. Browne who loves to flirt with the women smiled in his wrinkles, and people compared spring beds with coffins at the dining table, a usually jolly place. Mary Jane’s Academy piece had no melody; young men left, and Gabriel mentioned the generation “waning” and its “lack” of hostility in his speech. The Lass of Aughrim was sung in hoarseness, and its words expressing grief gave off a depressing air. Spirit, liveliness, and pleasure were nowhere to be found.

Though it is unusual that the annual dance, as it is a dance party, was static, on one hand it allowed Gabriel to think, to ponder. Gabriel’s random thoughts are expressed through his stream of consciousness, in which James Joyce conveys his ideas about the nature of thought. According to Joyce, every thought tends to be personal, with each consciousness always changing and sensibly continuous. This is why Gabriel’s emotions and perceptions seem to flow, with no break in between to separate one from another, eventually building up to form a sense of Gabriel as one entity. That his thoughts sometimes do not appear to be coherent clearly depicts life as an ongoing process where sometimes, nothing happens. As Sigmund Freud mentioned in his analysis of the human psyche, the unconscious may be a barrier to recognizing the truth, due to the appearance of once repressed thoughts on the surface. This illuminates Gabriel’s epiphany, or the sudden realizing that “one by one, [people] were all becoming shades.”

Everything goes on in Gabriel’s mind and also in an unattended moment, both characteristics of the “Joycean Epiphany.” This sudden spiritual manifestation, showing a phase of mind itself, does not occur when one wants it to, but when it is most unexpected. One would think that Gabriel would encounter his enlightening moment while giving a speech or perhaps while perusing through his thoughts when Mary Jane plays the music, but no, he does so when he looks outside the window and sees the snow, imagining a young boy with gorgeous eyes shivering beneath the tree. Focusing on the “whatness,” the “Joycean Epiphany” refers to the way a person perceives things. In “The Dead,” Gretta’s confession of her past yet still memorable love startles Gabriel, causing him to overthrow his original attitude towards the world and start focusing on the genuine meaning rather than the outer looks. Before the shift, the word “eyes” appears twenty-eight times, highlighting how important appearance is to Gabriel, but afterwards, actual expressions of emotions can be noticed.

“Therefore, I will not linger on the past,” states Gabriel, quite firmly in his speech at dinner. His dislike for clinging onto the past can be seen even in his slightest acts, such as him vigorously scraping his feet and trying to get rid of the snow, which symbolizes the past and the oppression deriving from it, on his goloshes. Gabriel seems rather strict about his feelings, and he apparently controls his own thoughts, filtering them by the standard of whether or not it is relevant to the present. This value, however, is shattered by Gretta’s story of her relationship with Michael Fuery, whom she thinks to have died for her. Although he was the one who had emphasized the need for people to forget about the past, he changes; he is jealous and angry when Gretta could not stop talking about how sweet a boy Michael Fuery was, and “generous tears fill[ed] Gabriel’s eyes” when he discovered the passionate love between Gretta and Michael. He starts yearning for the liveliness of romance that he had never had.

No longer is Gabriel obsessed with his belief that one must live in the present and the present only. He recognizes that the past and the present coexist, and that actually, as in the time of his epiphany, the dead may be more alive than the living.

“He is dead,” says Gretta.

Is he really?

*   *   *

Traditionally, an epiphany is defined to be a flash of recognition in which someone or something is seen in a new light, oftentimes conveying a divine touch. To me, though, an epiphany is when you suddenly “get it,” when everything falls into place, enabling you to realize something that you had no clue of beforehand. It could be as simple as Ella’s sudden realization that she could “unspell” herself from obeying everyone’s orders in the movie of “Ella Enchanted.”

I used to believe in the black-and-white theory to some extent, just assuming that if there was a good, there was a bad. Over the past few years, though, as I saw friends overcome conflicts with one another and more especially as I worked in the judicial council, I came to realize that there was no such thing as a right answer. There can never be a strict line drawn in between two opposite things, although there are exceptions in cases like gender. Tomatoes, for instance, are concerned in ongoing debates endlessly arguing whether they are vegetables or fruits. Similarly, I had an epiphany when I came to know that the same situation can be seen in various perspectives, each view having its own reasoning or story. You know what they say: Every side has its own story.