Katia N's Reviews > The Dead

It is just a short story… I’ve started to write my thoughts about it so many times. But it is so perfect, that by the time i reach the second paragraph, i hit the wall. My thoughts stick into each other and become an undistguishable whirlpool of awe.

So, you do not need to continue reading what follows; just read the story, and read it now when something is ending but something else is barely beginning just yet… Christmas and New Year, this time..

It starts with something very relatable, very traditional - two old ladies, the aunts of Gabriel, the main character, are hosting a Christmas party. They has been doing it for the last 30 years or so. The scenario is familiar, all usual faces of family and friends are there; everyone has got a predictable role naturally evolved during those years. Joyce describes the scene with absolutely delicious prose. A few words by him suffice when someone else would need five pages of the text. His language possess this musicality, totally unique to him. (From the writers I know, Nabokov comes close, but he sounds sometimes a little laboured):

“As the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-stiffened frieze, a cold fragrant air from out-of-doors escaped from crevices and folds.”

But there are people who are not there, though we feel there presence.. I think, in Poland they’ve got this tradition of keeping an empty chair for the family members who passed away. And Joyce keeps this chair as well very subtly for now. Gabriel looks at the portrait of his mum who died sometimes ago. He also makes a joke about his grandad.

But the story really goes into the highest gear in the last few pages. By sheer coincidence, Gabriel finds out something tragic and beautiful which existed in the life of his wife a way before him. This revelation totally shocks him; he is in awe with the magnitude of her experience and feels diminished by it.

It also derailes his train of thoughts towards the finiteness of life, towards the transience of our existence, especially of the older people we love. When we are young, we think they will be there forever. They are not supposed to age and change, and eventually “become shades”…

“His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.”

When i think about it, I see the huge limitless stage full of people and decorations with the single source of light. The light moves slowly beaming on a group for a time being and then moving towards another one, leaving everyone else there in shadow, never to come back…

And there is another layer there for me. He looks at his wife and realises that she now is not the same person who has had that experience. This young girl is a shade as well. Our old selfs are shades of us, the ones which do not exist any longer here, but the ones we still remember and miss and try to reach sometimes… And a familiar song, or drops of rain, or silent sound of snow could call upon and bring the one of these shades back for a fraction of a moment, and make it real again…

Happy New Year!