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.
