At the last, Gabriel’s epiphany ends up being less about love and more about death. He realizes the snow, which symbolizes mortality, is indiscriminate, just as death is universal. Everyone must die, regardless of who they are or what they accomplish in life. Furthermore, many of the dead characters in the text prove to be more important to the living characters than the other living people, and conversely, many of the living seem to be leading passionless lives like Gabriel’s, as though living in a death-like state. The snow unites the living and the dead, then, as the narration expands…