His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love.

The epiphany that follows at the end of the story is certainly more decisive, but its lasting significance nevertheless remains ambiguous: This moment suggests a fleeting encounter with his own image as others see it, and, by extension, a momentary awareness that there are other people in the world living their own lives and negotiating their own heartbreak. As he passed in the way of the cheval-glass he caught sight of himself in full length, his broad, well-filled shirt-front, the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror, and his glimmering gilt-rimmed eyeglasses. Gabriel stood stockstill for a moment in astonishment and then followed her. She broke loose from him and ran to the bed and, throwing her arms across the bed-rail, hid her face. Change tends to be gradual, a process of taking multiple steps to alter our view of the world and, in accordance with this, our behaviour.Ĭonsider Gabriel’s encounter with his own reflection in the mirror in the hotel room:

We all get swept up in moments which we think are going to define our lives and change our outlooks forever, but it’s often harder for us to change our ways as a result of one ‘lightbulb’ moment like this. We might ask whether Gabriel’s final epiphany in ‘The Dead’ represents a permanent and life-changing shift in his attitudes – the dawning of empathy, perhaps – or whether Joyce is inviting us to view the change in his mood as temporary. This epiphany often provides a similar function to a plot twist or denouement in a more traditional (i.e., plot-driven) story: at the end of a detective story the mystery is solved and the criminal unmasked, for instance.īut epiphanies in modernist fiction, and especially in the stories of Joyce’s Dubliners, are frequently ambiguously poised between capturing genuine enlightenment (the protagonist has a life-changing realisation) and temporary change of mood (the protagonist thinks they have undergone a life-changing experience, but in reality, nothing has changed and they will probably relapse into their old habits the next day).

See the example of Gabriel’s ‘Generous tears’ below, for instance.Īnother key feature of James Joyce’s short stories, as with the stories of other modernist writers like Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield, is the epiphany: a realisation or revelation experienced by a central character in the story. One of the effects of this, of course, is that it becomes difficult to know when a particular word or phrase should be heard in the narrator’s voice or in the ‘voice’ of one of the characters.

James joyce short stories