7 - Conclusion

Summary

The power of the dead to disturb the living is explored in James Joyce's short story ‘The Dead’. Gretta's resurrection of the memory of the long-deceased Michael Furey, entombed in a lonely graveyard in Oughterard, in the western county of Galway, displaces her husband Gabriel's cultural and emotional coordinates. From the comfort of their room in Dublin's fashionable Gresham Hotel, Gabriel is confronted with his wife's past. Gabriel's belief that he must look to continental Europe to enhance his intellectual formation, rather than towards the provincial backwater of a city from which he comes or from the west of Ireland where Irish cultural revivalists locate their centre of intellectual gravity, is completely shaken. The revelation that the memory of the dead can inform so much of Gretta's identity challenges his optimism that the future of his marriage and his life rests upon the absorption of European cultural traditions.

Joyce's deployment of memory and spatial categories – the Irish west and the Gaeltacht, continental Europe, Dublin's opera venues, the central plain of Ireland – to anchor his story of early twentieth-century Dublin life, reinforces the contention that time and space, memory and identity get calibrated in fractured ways and the paths of history, nightmarish as they might be, can never be totally relegated to the tomb. This book has attempted to examine the routes by which European history literally travelled into the Irish imagination through the loss of thousands of Irish soldiers' lives during the First World War.