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The Dead - James Joyce, religious connotations - Gabriel + Michael -…

- - - - misusing literally - educated at the time would look down on that - Joyce wouldn't use language like that but Lily would - moved inside Lily's head
    - - get to know what class they are - pointing out structure of the family, the status they have and who does what - dissecting social structure and fabric of story
      - shows wealth - "pyramid of oranges"
    - - giving hints that this will be a celebratory night, moment of love, liveliness -
      - expectation part of the magic - Women's Christmas - people get together and share food and companionship - generous towards each other
    - - Gabriel's first "wrong", embarassment
      - when he takes a coin to give Lily it highlights class tension, as he believes that money is the best option to give her as a way of asking for forgiveness
      - "discomposed by the girl's bitter and sudden retort" - offended at the reply, class tensions/he thinks highly of himself and his ego is insulted
      - goloshes also make him embarrassed, ego bruised
    - - calling the other guests dumb and putting him on a pedestal
      - educated therefore he acts superior
      - "grade of culture differed from his"
      - class and culture - feels superior - not becoming more sympathetic to him - but very self-conscious - following him in story as a complex figure
    - - sonorous descriptions
      - "slow eyes and parted lips" - playing with sensory elements and navigating the evening through Gabriel's perspective
      - sibilance - s sounds - moving like a musical language - story where music is very important - being lullabied into his mental state - the way he sees his aunts and the wider picture - one is fragile and vulnerable - we see it through his mind, subjectivity
    - - Ivors a nationalist, different view of Ireland
      - "West Briton" by Ivors, "Irish is not my language" by Gabriel
      - shows political and cultural tensions
      - "you know nothing of, your own people and your own country?" - Ivors
      - "retorted" - feels like she's mocking him, offended - biographical element in the story - Joyce, his wife very similar to Gabriel and Gretta
      - not comfortable - morale and reasons for this never given - get a sense that he is being criticized and Ivors is critical of his sense of superiority and cosmopolitanism
      - Gabriel shared Joyce's desires - European and travelling abroad - Joyce presenting character as someone who does have a sense of superiority but wants to be liked - character is not a hero of this story despite narrative following his perspective
      - "tried to cover his agitation" - feeling emasculated - joyce exposes himself - naturalistic desire, trying to show things as they are
      - class/race/ideology/religion - putting all out in the open - even if it means creating a negative portrait of himself (joyce) - doesn't try to moralise the reade
    - - Gabriel wanted to get inside Gretta's head - modernist element
      - "eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart" - love for her and fascination with her emotions and what she's thinking
      - "trembling with annoyance. Why did she seem so abstracted?" - desperate to understand her to the point of annoyance
      - "longed to be the master of her strange mood"
      - "she had not told him all the story" -trying to get into the mind of his wife - steam of consciousness - what he find there he doesn't like - dilemma of modernist - he finds this figure - wife's bloom due to her past lover and not him
    - - Gabriel wishes to be close to his wife, starts reminicising on their past and life
      - "desire to seize her" - impulsive desire
    - - Gabriel feeling jealous, awkward from hearing that his wife had a past lover, when he had been desiring her so much
      - his ego has fallen and crashed - "pitiable fatuous fellow", no longer thinks so well of himself, ridiculing himself
      - "hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life"
      - disappointed kind of? in the fact that him as a husband was not the sole cause of his wife's love, and that he did not play such a crucial part as he thought in his wife's life - because of his being unsure about himself, maybe his love for his wife or vice versa gave his life meaning, and now that he has realised that his life doesn't have much meaning anymore
    - - envies romanticisim of others, but not capable - detached - metaphor for joyce's reflection of ireland - no longer able to romanticise ireland, its past and its culture
      - "such a feeling must be love" -unable to have the spark that the romantics have - believes modernity is somewhere else
      - gabriel one-sided idea of what modernity is - west, progress, not linked to "ancient", old-fashioned and paralysed roots - but still envies that, out of the passion that things will change - acknowledging that he's becoming a modern man detached from country and himself - doesn't feel alive
    - - zombie- loss of identity - stuck in purgatory - shades and snowflakes resembling the dead (souls?) passing away to the afterlife
      - "these dead had one time reared and lived in" - the world itself is slowly ending - can't escape the passage of time - links back to his ideas of new generation of world being not cultured
      - snow also being so spread across ireland that it shows that ireland's people are losing their sense of identity and culture, no chance of revival
      - "snow was falling all over Ireland" -ireland full of tensions, changes, differences - seeing death and life covering these all in one - feels disconnected
    - - change of heart, perception of the world, being part of something else, transcendence and universal - state of spiri
      - after being anxious, jealous, strong feelings - wanted to be inside wife's mind - minds of other characters - free indirect speech - speech of narrator merges with voice of characters - voice of all over ireland
      - "soul swooned slowly" -soul equated with the dead, connected with all of this - feeling of disconnect was so distressing, now trying to find visions to compensate for that
      - feeling part of something bigger - story full of differences, but now in the epiphany realising what is death and life - finds community - humbling to him, part of collective