“Gabriel Conroy’s ‘Generous Tears’”

As the snow came falling upon Dublin, it was almost as if the city and its inhabitants would remain frozen together. Dublin and every thing it stood for would linger, as her citizens’ lives would continue forward, never truly able to escape the city’s grip. One man in particular, dishearteningly sat gazing out the window upon the dreary frosted world. Gabriel Conroy’s elaborate and sophisticated life, as he saw it, seemed to have come loose from his control. The world as he imaginably created began to disintegrate, leaving with him generous tears falling from his eyes. James Joyce, the author of the trifling epics of Dublin’s ordinary populaces found in Dubliners, places prodigious emphasis on its finale, The Dead. Here, Joyce attempts to convey to the audience a moment of epiphany in Gabriel’s life, a moment which fills Gabriel’s eyes with generous tears.

Gabriel Conroy encompasses the traits of the protagonists in the short stories leading to The Dead. Class conscious, socially awkward, short tempered and frustrated with love; Gabriel is a complex case, struggling through the annual social gathering taking place within the story. In the end, Gabriel is stricken with grief coming to a cold conclusion after his interactions with the many characters throughout the novella. While the tears may seem as an attempt to draw sympathy from the audience, the true focus is whether the Gabriel shown towards the end of the novella is different than the Gabriel in the beginning. Rather than a change in his behavior, the interactions throughout the story draw a new outlook on life from Gabriel. Through analysis of Gabriel’s thoughts and desires during the annual party held by his aunts Kate and Julia Morkan, the audience digests th...

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... Gabriel saw it, would dawn upon each and every person of the world that he had once felt so principal in.

Generous tears would soon fall from Gabriel’s eyes as he sat gazing out the window watching the snow fall upon Dublin. Life had become understood as a measurement of the impact one leaves, with which, Gabriels life had not been so profound as he was always convinced of. “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” (249) Death, just like the snow that evening, would fall upon everyone and Gabriel remained in tears knowing that his life was so empty compared to that of his wife’s first lover. All that remained for people would be the shade they leave behind in the world, Gabriel’s, more darker than the rest.