Review
The Dead
What if the person you love most had already been loved better — by a boy who died for her at seventeen? Joyce does not deliver that blow in a confessional or a courtroom, but at the end of a family party, in a hotel room, while snow falls over Dublin. Out of that ordinary evening — not out of any announced tragedy — comes the story that closes Dubliners and, for many readers, the best thing Joyce ever wrote.
The last story in Dubliners, and the way in
Published in 1914 as the closing story of Dubliners, The Dead belongs to the modernism Joyce would blow wide open eight years later with Ulysses — and that difference matters for any reader frightened off by his reputation. There is no stream of consciousness here, no encyclopaedic scaffolding. There is a party, a speech, a staircase, a hotel window and the snow. Joyce is among the decisive writers of the twentieth century in English, and this story is the door through which he can actually be entered.