James Joyce The Dead Sympathy Essay

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James Joyce’s “The Dead” is a short story about the self realizations of a man named Gabriel Conroy. C. C. Loomis, Jr. author of the critique Structure and Sympathy in Joyce's “The Dead” believes that this self realization or epiphany “manifests Joyce’s fundamental belief that true, objective perception will lead to true, objective sympathy.”(C. C. Loomis 149) Loomis further explains that for the reader to experience this objective sympathy, he or she must experience the self realization with Gabriel's character by understanding his emotions. However, the reader must avoid identifying as Gabriel himself or they risk missing the transformation. To avoid this, the author constantly widens the gap between the reader and Gabriel through the clever …show more content…

This narrow scope, along with the perpetual speed of the story is used as a vehicle to the reader's “aesthetic sympathy”. Loomis believes that “from the combination of general and particular we are given a universal symbol in the vision itself.”(C. C. Loomis 151) After reading the story again and looking from a formalist point of view, I find Loomis’s insight very useful in further understanding the story. When analyzing the story in different pieces and fitting them together like a puzzle, the reader can easily watch Gabriel’s ego and lack of emotional sensitivity vanish as his conscious transforms. Reading the story from Loomis’s point of view allows the reader to realize a specific pattern which builds upon itself throughout the story. “ ‘The Dead’ follows a logical pattern; we move from the general to the particular, then to a final universal. We see Gabriel’s world generally, then we focus down to the particular, and from the combination of the general and particular we are given a universal symbol in the vision itself.”(C. C. Loomis 151) Once this pattern is realized the story comes together as a whole and the message becomes clear to the

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