ABSTRACT
In the memorable closing scene of James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’, the composure of the urbane and self-centred Gabriel Conroy is shattered when he discovers that his wife, Gretta, still pines for a young man, Michael Furey, whom she knew years earlier in the west of Ireland. The night before she left for Dublin, the seriously ill Michael Furey had risen from his bed to see her, and died a week later from a chill caught standing in the cold winter rain. As snow begins to fall outside their hotel window, Gabriel’s thoughts drift towards the west of Ireland in a trancelike reverie:
The time had come for him to set out on his journey westwards. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, f alling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling on the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was f alling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns (1992a: 225).
