Snowy Revelations: a Possible Inspiration for the Ending of James Joyce's ‘The Dead’ in Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground

Abstract

AT the end of James Joyce's Dubliners story ‘The Dead’, Gabriel Conroy's intermingled egotism and amorous expectations are dashed when, amid an intermittent (and emblematic) snowfall, his wife Gretta tearfully reveals a much cherished past love. Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann has proposed as inspiration for Gabriel's deflating experience a parallel scene at the end of George Moore's 1891 novel Vain Fortune.1 So too have descriptively similar antecedents been proposed for the snowy setting of the protagonist's revelation, like the panorama of snow covering the California Sierras which begins the 1876 Bret Harte novel Gabriel Conroy (also Joyce's likely source for his character's name).2 Moore's novel, however, contains no snow, and Harte's snow frames no emotional revelation, which prompted Ellmann to assert, ‘No one can know how Joyce conceived the joining of Gabriel's final experience with the snow’.3 While a literary antecedent for this joining, of course, need not exist, I believe a case can be made for Joyce finding inspiration for his snow scene at the end of Dostoevsky's 1864 novella Notes from the Underground.