Misreadings, Self-Misprisions, and Fabricated Resolutions in Joyce’s “The Dead”

Abstract:Joyce’s “The Dead” contains a number of partial and misleading narratives related in an unexpected manner, and as such greatly rewards a narrative- centered analysis. Misinterpretation is general in this work; one might argue that the text is primarily a record of Gabriel’s repeated misinterpretations of the people and narratives around him. This is true of the women he interacts with; most egregiously, he does not even imagine that his wife has a story independent of her life with him. An attention to narrative and interpretation in turn leads to a different reading of the ending of the text. Far from being a definitive epiphany that finally reveals the bitter truth about himself and his marriage, Gabriel’s closing convictions are yet additional misinterpretations about his marriage, his situation, and his life, and rather Romantic ones at that, which the reader trained by this text would be wise to question and reject in favor of a more skeptical conclusion. In addition, the kind of third-person narration with a single focalizer for nearly all of the text lends itself to the kind of misleading conclusions which Margot Norris has identified; this strategy reproduces and even re-enacts the text’s larger hermeneutical dramas, as the reader is challenged to see through a rhetoric that naturalizes an ideological perspective that seems untroubled by imperial rule.