The Significance Of Paralysis In The Dead

The Paralysis of Dublin

What is the significance of Gabriel’s paralysis in “The Dead”? Allusions to paralysis have been woven throughout Dubliners. We know that the mad priest in “The Sisters” is physically afflicted with paralysis and that the narrator of “An Encounter” is paralyzed by fear of the old pervert on the way to the Pigeon House and is forced to return home. Eveline is gripped by indecision in “Eveline”. So much so that she is paralyzed by it on the docks and is unable to move forward into an uncertain but possibly happy future with her lover. Instead she has doomed herself to a life of certain misery. The boy in Araby arrives too late to buy Mahoney’s sister anything because his uncle arrived home late drunk and didn’t

The only thing that keeps him from breaking is his sudden desire for his wife, Gretta, that overcomes him. He observes her from the bottom of the staircase as she leans on the bannister above him listening to Mr D’Arcy sing “The Lass of Aughrim”. He idolizes her, wondering what a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, was a symbol of (182). For the rest of the night his anticipation builds and builds until it is shattered by his wife confessing that she has spent the entire night thinking about a boy from her past. The expected epiphany is that Gabriel will realize that he will never truly be able to know or connect with his wife, but Joyce turns our expectations on their heads. The epiphany is that, until this moment Gabriel had never truly known his wife, but now he has made the greatest connection possible with her. Greta’s confession has allowed Gabriel into one of the greatest events in her life. He can draw closer to her because he can now better understand and know Greta more intimately than he could before. This is Gabriel's first step in overcoming his paralysis and leaving the land of the dead and everything that paralyzed him

This is the final epiphany that Joyce wished to impart to his readers. Especially those in Ireland as he hopes that it will inspire his Irish readers to recognize their own paralysis and take the necessary steps to rouse themselves. Vivian Heller said in her book, Joyce, Decadence and Emancipation that, “Joyce liked to say that life in his native city was a form of paralysis….As the following lines, written in the defence of Dubliners, suggest, he conceived of his first major work a kind of diagnosis: “It is not my fault that the odor of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs around my stories. I seriously believe you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass” (Heller 13). Joyce wrote Dubliners because he believed that Ireland could break itself free of its paralysis, they only needed to take one good look at themselves to do