James Joyce completes his series, The Dubliners, with a story that does not give any hope for Ireland. "The Dead," refers "to the story's moribund characters and their preoccupation with the past" (Munich 173). Though the title is quite morbid, the theme of mortality is constantly reinforced throughout the entire story. This final story concludes "a collection of stories that begins with the statement "there was no hope" and ends with the words "the dead"" (Peterson). To finalize his perception of Ireland as a country of the dead, Joyce uses death imagery and Gabriel's life to illustrate Irish culture as living in the past.
Joyce's use of imagery and symbols of death throughout the short story reinforces his views of Ireland. The title itself shows Ireland is dead and must reach an epiphany to exit its hopeless state. The first introduced character is a symbol of death. Lily's "pale complexion," (Joyce 856) is like that of a corpse, even her name is that of a funeral flower. The next characters introduced to the reader are the two "old women," (Joyce 857) Aunt Julia and Aunt Kate, "quite grey [and] too feeble to go about much" (Joyce 855). Their niece, Mary Jane, who was quite on in years, lives with them. Since Lily has renounced marriage and men in general, the house has become a house of the dead; no more life will come from the womb of these women. When the aunts dead sister's son, (Joyce 858) Gabriel Conroy, arrives he teasingly tells his aunts that his wife, Gretta, has taken "there mortal hours" (Joyce 856) to get dressed. The aunts tell old stories of old Patrick Morkan and his "never-to-be-forgotten Johnny" (Joyce 875) the horse, to relive past memories and "as in years past" (Joyce 872) Gabriel gives his speech to continue tradition. These actions enforce Joyce's convictions of Ireland living in the past. In the description of the Morkan's home, the reader notices a picture of Romeo and Juliet (who died for their love in Shakespeare's play, as Gretta will later say her childhood sweetheart died for her), a picture of "two murdered princes, Edward and Richard, in the Tower" (Joyce 862), as well as a photograph of their deceased sister Ellen.
