“The Dead” is notable for its striking, prolonged physical descriptions of various characters in the story, including Gabriel Conroy, its protagonist:
He was a stout tallish young man. The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes. His glossy black hair was parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind his ears where it curled slightly beneath the groove left by his hat.
This image of Gabriel—the first in the story—highlights various important aspects of his personality: his restlessness (the “restless” “scintillation” of his glasses’ lenses, and his own “restless” eyes), his punctiliousness (indicated by his neat appearance and careful grooming), and his immaturity (as evidenced by his “hairless” face and the color in his cheeks). Taken together, these qualities suggest that Gabriel thinks highly of himself and his own scruples, and has not yet faced any serious setbacks in life.
Later, this description will stand in sharp contrast to the image Gabriel forms of himself at the end of the story, when he glances in a mirror and sees his own flaws clearly for the first time—coming to think of himself as a myopic fool, and to recognize the harmful effects of his arrogance.
This imagery also demonstrates Joyce’s knack for specificity in description—attending to minute details like the “groove left by his hat”—as well as his rhythmic, sometimes repetitive prose. Here, as in other parts of the story, Joyce repeats certain words and sounds, which helps to emphasize the ideas behind those words. For example, the repetition of words ending in “-less”—“restless,” “formless,” “hairless”—seems to suggest that for all of his confidence, Gabriel may still be lacking something, and that he is far less confident and self-assured than he appears.
The final image in “The Dead” is arguably the story’s most famous passage, and one of its most evocative. As Gabriel falls asleep next to Gretta, who has just revealed a crucial memory from her childhood to her husband—her belief that a young boy, Michael Furey, died for her—snow is falling, both outside of Gabriel’s windows and all throughout Ireland:
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, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. [...] His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
In this passage, Joyce's use of alliteration with soft consonant sounds ("soul swooned slowly" and "falling faintly" or “faintly falling”) seems to mimic the gentle drift of the snow as it falls, making the scene powerfully tangible. Additionally, Joyce’s roving perspective, encompassing parts of Ireland with no direct connection to Gabriel as well as one with a very direct connection—Michael Furey’s gravesite—becomes a commentary on universality. As part of his epiphanic moment, Gabriel seems at last to understand himself as just one individual in a crowded world, part of “all the living and the dead” on whom the snow is falling. Though the precise details of Gabriel’s future remain unknown to the reader, it is clear that he has been united with other Irish people—even if subconsciously—in their shared knowledge of life and death, relinquishing the feelings of estrangement and singularity he previously experienced. Thus, Gabriel undergoes a kind of ego death that allows him to understand his own mortality. Ironically, though he has been with other people throughout the evening, it is only once he returns to his home, and is alone at last with his thoughts, that he is able to undergo this profound experience of communality.
Toward the end of “The Dead,” Gabriel realizes that his wife, Gretta, has been “comparing him in her mind with another”: Michael Furey, a boy with whom she had a brief relationship when she was younger, and who died of consumption after confessing his love for her on a cold night. In a crucial moment, Gabriel experiences a dramatic, clarifying vision of himself, contrasted with Gretta’s memory of Furey as a kind of martyr:
A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror.
This vision's "shameful" imagery—part of the epiphanic moment for which “The Dead” is well-known—upends and undermines the arrogance with which Gabriel has conducted himself throughout the evening. Though the third-person perspective allows the reader to understand Gabriel’s flaws from the outset of the story, Gabriel himself seems largely unaware of them until this moment, in which he is finally able to step outside of himself and see how his own behavior may have affected others negatively. Gretta’s belief in Furey’s martrydom may be misguided—it’s possible that Furey’s death had nothing to do with his confession of love—but her belief in his courage and selflessness humbles Gabriel, who realizes how egotistical ("ludicrous," "clownish," "pitiable") he has seemed in comparison. Additionally, this description serves as an amplification of the objective, third-person description of Gabriel from the beginning of the story, which hints at his character flaws without making them explicit: by the end of the story, Gabriel himself can clearly recognize and acknowledge them.
