Form and Subtext in Joyce's "The Dead"

Abstract

Conroy, a provincial writer and teacher with Continental aspirations, parodies the greatness to which Joyce aspired. hero endures a figurative counterpart (epic struggle, crucifixion, and conversion) of Joyce's own battle to become an international artist. During these years, Joyce was remaking Stephen Hero into a modern novel, thinking of Ulysses, and altering the shape of Dubliners by adding The Dead. Radical revision of style can be experienced as killing off a past identity. apparently disparate battle images in The Dead offer a symbolic account of the author, in a hellish exile, struggling with his earlier literary forms. young artist's grandiose scheme in Portrait to forge the uncreated conscience of his race required purging old patterns in the soul's smithy; in The Dead the title refers not only to the story's moribund characters and their preoccupation with the past but also to the kind of artist Joyce was putting behind him. Joyce divided the story into three distinct sections, with a noticeable (though less explicitly demarcated) fourth part. These sections-form and subtext-describe Joyce's emotional strife in evolving his modernist style, a style (as in Portrait) that depended on an altered relationship between teller and tale and between tale and language.