Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nGH0EZLm1o
“The Dead” is a story written from memory. As Richard Ellmann describes in his biography on James Joyce, the final and longest story in Dubliners, which is ostensibly about Dublin, was actually written in Trieste.
How did Joyce, who rarely visited Ireland after his self-imposed exile in 1904, manage to paint such well-regarded literary portraits of people and their everyday lives in Dublin? What Ellmann reveals is the influence of Joyce’s autobiographical memory on Dubliners.
The party at the Morkan’s resembles celebrations held by Joyce’s own family on Usher’s Island before Twelfth Night. Gabriel’s commanding speech at the feast is modeled after the way Joyce’s father talked. Even the story’s climactic scene, in which Gabriel learns that Gretta continues to dwell on the memory of Michael Furey, is based on an experience where Joyce’s wife Nora Barnacle revealed to him that a boy named Sonny Bodkin had died of tuberculosis after having sung in the rain outside her Galway home. Joyce’s intense sense of jealousy about Nora’s longing for the past becomes the source of what Daniel Schwarz calls “Gabriel’s paralytic self-consciousness,” and “The Dead” can be read as an artistic rendering of Joyce’s memories.
