James Joyce's The Dead - Gabriel's Search for Self

Gabriel's Search for Self in The Dead

The study of Gabriel's character is probably one of the most important aims in James Joyce's The Dead1. What shall we think of him? Is the reader supposed to think little of Gabriel or should he/she even feel sorry for him? This insecurity already implies that the reader gets more and more aware that he/she develops ambivalent feeling towards Gabriel and that his character is presented from various perspectives. Gabriel's conduct appears to be split and seems to represent different red threads in The Dead; it leads the reader through the whole story. Those different aspects in his conduct, and also the way this multicoloured character is presented to the reader, strongly points at the assumption that he is wearing a kind of mask throughout the course of events. But at the very end, after the confession of his beloved wife, Gabriel's life is radically changed and, most importantly, his masks fall.

The scene with Lily (p.2009) in the very beginning of the story shows us already quite a lot about Gabriel: He appears good-humoured, talkative and behaves very kind to her. In this situation we find one of his many character traits: Gabriel is presented to us as a quite talkative, decent and cheerful 'small talk partner'. This aspect of his character, that accompanies us on many pages, is quite strong. Some scenes, three of them are mentioned here, can be uncovered as good examples of his kind way to spread a cheerful atmosphere: "He felt quite at ease now for he was an expert carver and liked nothing better than to find himself at the head of a well-laden table." (p.2020) This description of his attitude at the dinner table shows us very good that Gabriel is able to entertain p...

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...a mask.

To sum up everything we can say that Gabriel's story in The Dead surely is not a story about love, nor about a man with different faces but much more a story about a man finding his way out of the life he never really lived. The prime concern is that in this story we are dealing with a progress or a development of Gabriel's character. It is a progress of finding his true self, which he himself probably not even knew. Self-awareness, self-consciousness and a sudden real subjectivity are the 'signposts' in Gabriel's path he has to undergo.

1 Joyce, James : The Dead , Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol.2, sixth edition

2 Rimmon-Kenan, Slomith: Story-Characters Narrative Fiction and contemporary poetics, Routledge 1983

3 Woolf, Virginia: A sketch of the past , Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol.2 , sixth edition