Joyce's Beloved

In The Dead, James Joyce lets symbolism flow freely throughout his short story. James Joyce utilizes his main characters and objects in The Dead to impress upon his readers his view of Dublin's crippled condition. Not only does this apply to just The Dead, Joyce's symbolic themes also exude from his fourteen other short stories that make up the rest of Joyce's book, Dubliners, to describe his hometown's other issues of corruption and death that fuel Dublin's paralysis. After painting this grim picture of Dublin, James Joyce uses it to express his frustration and to explain his realistic view that the only solution to the issues with Dublin depends on a move to the West and towards a new life, rather than remaining cooped up like Gabriel Conroy in the hopeless city.

On July 3, 1904, James Joyce sent a postcard to his friend Constantine P. Curran exclaiming with excitement that he had just finished a book and that he was now working on "a series of epicleti--ten--for a paper...called the Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city" (Gilbert 55). Joyce passionately believed that the Irish society had been locked in place for many years due to the power struggle between the Roman Catholic Church and England. As a result of this power feud, Ireland became one of the poorest and least-developed countries in all of Western Europe at the turn of the 20th century. Consequently, these symbolic representations of paralysis continually persist throughout Joyce's short stories in Dubliners. In The Dead, an unmistakable symbol of Dublin's paralysis occurs with the subject of Gabriel's grandfather and his horse Johnny.

"Johnny used to work in the old gentleman's mill, walking round and round in order to drive the mill...when one fine day...out from the mansion of his forefathers, [Gabriel's grandfather] drove with Johnny. And everything went on beautifully until Johnny came in sight of King Billy's statue...and he began to walk round the statue...round and round he went" (The Dead 47).

Interestingly, although the circle traditionally symbolizes unity and life as with wedding bands, James Joyce decides to use it to show Dublin's undefeatable lack of progress and development. Joyce craftily uses Johnny to represent the city of Dublin and shows how its development progressed "beautifully" until it reached a certain point in its growth where it could no longer advance and no matter what its citizens, depicted as Gabriel's grandfather, could do, Dublin could not grow or advance any further and continued to circle in the same position for centuries.

Coupled with his depiction of Dublin's immobile status through his characters, James Joyce also exemplifies his theme of paralysis through snow. In Daniel R. Schwarz's psychoanalytic criticism of The Dead, he explains that "the snow imagery focuses our attention on a world outside Gabriel...where as ice, it suggests the emotional sterility of a world reduced to social gestures, empty talk, and loveless relationships" (Schwarz 123). However, I disagree with Schwarz and believe that James Joyce uses snow to symbolically represent the cold and dead Dublin due to its uncertain political period. When Gabriel first enters his aunt's party, "A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toecaps on the toes of his galoshes; and as the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-stiffened frieze, a cold fragrant air from out-of-doors escaped from crevices and folds" (The Dead 23). This symbolism comes back at the end of The Dead through Gabriel's later thoughts on how the snow "was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills...falling upon every part of the lonely churchyard," and touching both the living and the dead, symbolizing that not only Gabriel, but his entire country, both the living and the lifeless had been united in Dublin's frozen paralysis (The Dead 59).

Joyce's theme of paralysis also emanates through the other short stories in Dubliners. The Sisters immediately introduces this theme through the first paragraph as the main character would look into the window of the dying Father Flynn and say "softly to [himself] the word paralysis" (Dubliners 1). Furthermore, the unnamed main character in The Sisters says, "the word paralysis...had always sounded strangely in my ears...but now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I long to be nearer to it and to look up on its deadly work" (Dubliners 1). James Joyce uses this at the beginning of Dubliners to show that despite Dublin's contempt for its lack of progress, it can not seem to escape from its paralytic condition and even desires "to be nearer to it and look upon its deadly work." James Joyce purposely puts the word paralysis in the first page of the book in order to set up the grim tone for the rest of the short stories in Dubliners to follow. With his second short story, An Encounter, James Joyce again stresses Dublin's paralytic state through symbolic representations. While the boys try to return home at the end of the day, they encounter a stranger who at some point stands "up slowly, saying that he had to leave [them] for a minute or so...and without changing the direction...[he walked] slowly away from [them] towards the near end of the field" (Dubliners 16), where he ends up masturbating ("'I say! Look at what he's doing...I say...He's a queer old josser!'"). Joyce depicts this as a kind of paralysis as masturbation does not result in either procreation or even love.

For the remainder of An Encounter, James Joyce continues to emphasize the struggle of Dublin through his main character. The main character had heard through stories "of the glory of the Wild West" and "began to hunger for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder seemed to offer" him (Dubliners 11). So, he and his friends decided to "go along the Wharf Road until [they] came to the ships, then to cross in the ferryboat and walk out to see the Pigeon House." However, in the end, they had only "wandered" around Dublin until "the sun went in behind some clouds and left [them] to [their] jaded thoughts and the crumbs of [their] provisions" (Dubliners 14). In An Encounter, James Joyce artfully uses these boys to symbolize the city of Dublin. Although Dublin desires to break away from "the routine" and start a new life, it only ended up wandering around in its same debilitated condition, weary, and left with its poverty and hunger.

Tied closely