‘The Dead’: The Greatest Short Story in English

Many readers find James Joyce forbidding. Begin, then, not with the labyrinth of Ulysses but with the last story in Dubliners — ‘The Dead,’ which many consider the finest short story ever written in English, and which asks nothing of you but attention.

For most of its length it seems to be merely a Christmas party: a genial gathering of aunts and cousins in Dublin, dancing, a goose carved, a slightly tipsy speech. Gabriel Conroy, self-satisfied, moves through it thinking himself superior to these provincial people. And then, at the very end, his wife hears an old song, and tells him about a boy she loved when she was young, a boy who died, she believes, for love of her — and Gabriel’s whole comfortable sense of himself quietly collapses.

The final page, in which the snow falls ‘upon all the living and the dead,’ is one of the summits of prose in the language — a sudden widening from a single wounded man to all of mortal life, everyone who has loved and everyone who has died. Nothing dramatic happens, and everything happens. It is the purest demonstration of what Joyce could do.

Like Lawrence, Joyce found the epic hidden inside ordinary lives.

Read Dubliners — the Erato Press edition →