Love defining life and death, in ‘The Dead’, by James Joyce.

Love defining life and death, in ‘The Dead’, by James Joyce.

by Jorge A. Capel

Love can define and be defined by many things. That is definitely one of the reasons why it is so difficult to talk about it and describe everything within its area. Therefore, everybody has read something about love at least once in his/her life, but James Joyce has made a difference by handling this theme graciously and from an unusual perspective in his tale ‘The Dead’.
For a better understanding of this theme it is necessary to understand the principles of the stream of consciousness, a term coined by James Joyce, which is the written representation of a character’s inner thoughts and memories, that doesn’t follow a sequential time line, defining and describing a character from those very thoughts. The identification of the stream of consciousness in Joyce’s text is of extreme importance, because, defining the characters of Gabriel and Gretta from Gabriel’s thoughts and memories, it is possible to realize how love defines the concepts of life and death proposed at the beginning.
To guide this analysis it is important to set the time and place where I am going to begin – The hotel scene. The story starts to get completely different after the hotel scene, in which readers are told a very well hidden secret from Gretta. At this point Gretta tells her husband Gabriel that she once had a young lover and that they were very close to each other at the time, but he ended up dying very young. Gabriel, of course, gets angry and we can notice from his thoughts and acts that he is deeply nervous. It all gets worse when he asks her ironically what he died of, and she tells him that she thinks he died for her. That simple phrase is enough to make Gabriel’s head ache with thoughts, and those thoughts go from Gretta’s love for him to his aunt Julia’s death, that, in his opinion, was about to happen. That very simple thought is enough to make him realize really meaningful things about life, and how, in the end, one by one, we are all becoming shadows.
From that conversation with his wife, Gabriel also discovers that all of that time he had played a very poor part in his wife’s life, or at least not as important of a part as the one played by Michael Furey, the man who died for Gretta’s sake. The most important thing about this event is that Gabriel finally sees that feeling love for someone is a lot more than what he feels for his wife, admitting that he had never felt he could die for any woman, and he was sure that what Michael felt was love. Love defines life and death in this tale as, to Gretta, at this point, Michael seems to be closer to her than Gabriel, so the love they both feel for her defines who is dead and who is alive for Gretta. Gabriel knows that his feelings for his wife were not as intense as Michael’s, and it unfolded his eyes to the truth, that we can all be either dead at some point to someone, even if we are not physically gone. Michael was gone, but his memory is Gretta’s mind was still very vivid and almost alive, not simply a shade as Gabriel himself says, but a full memory.
Joyce is very competent in talking about people’s feelings. Everybody is a bit like Gretta. Who is the one who has not lost a father, a mother, an aunt, a grandparent? The love we feel keeps them alive and that is exactly what Joyce meant to emphasize, that people can be dead to us even being physically present, and, like in his story, love is what makes us define who is and who is not dead and alive to us.
To conclude, James Joyce brings up a relation in which we tend to ignore, sometimes even for our own good, the relation we all have with life and death, and how we can always be surrounded by dead people.