Essay on James Joyces The Dead - Gabriels Search for Self

Gabriels Search for Self in The Dead The study of Gabriels character is probably one of the most important aims in James Joyces The Dead1. What shall we think of him? Is the reader supposed to think little of Gabriel or should he/she even feel sorry for him? This insecurity already implies that the reader gets more and more aware that he/she develops ambivalent feeling towards Gabriel and that his character is presented from various perspectives. Gabriels conduct appears to be split and seems to represent different red threads in The Dead; it leads the reader through the whole story. Those different aspects in his conduct, and also the way this multicoloured character is presented to the reader, strongly points at the†¦show more content†¦The way the people in his social millieu like to listen to him, how he puts them at ease, how they reward his eloquence with smiles and applause, and also the smart appearance of Gabriel himself makes the reader assume that he is a very intelligent, elegant and self-confident person. A third example where we can see quite clearly how accepted and enjoyed Gabriels presence is, is the scene where he tells the people, just before leaving, the story about Johnny. ... peals of laughter (which( followed Gabriels imitation of the incident... (p.2027) lead us to a similar characterization as in the examples above. But the point is that analysing only these small talk scenes in such an isolated way gives us a very narrow point of view. The assumption that our focused character is self-confident and unbound is thrown over-board as soon as we are concentrating on other aspects of his conduct. James Joyce presents Gabriel to us, as already mentioned, from different perspectives, of which the character traits in the previous paragraph could be one. A second set of traits that I want to discuss appears even more frequent in the story. If we start our reflections again at the very beginning of the short story, the scene with Lily, we uncover another striking element of Gabriels behaviour; Hes not just kind and decentShow MoreRelated Compare and Contrast: ‘A desirable society’ Essay2015 Words   |  9 PagesBoth Andre Brink’s ‘A Dry White Season’ and James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ display two very different societies undergoing artistic, cultural and political transitions. In 1914, Ireland saw the Nationalist party at its peak, where Irish society was desperately searching for a sense of cultural identity and political stability. Joyce takes an apolitical approach in order to objectively show Dublin to his fellow Dubliners in hi s ‘nicely polished looking glass.’ Andre Brink, in comparison, documents a temporalRead MoreEssay on Male and Female Paralysis in James Joyces Dubliners3585 Words   |  15 PagesMale and Female Paralysis in Dubliners Critics widely recognized that each story within James Joyce’s Dubliners contains a theme of paralysis. In fact, Joyce himself wrote, â€Å"My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis† (Joyce, letter to Grant Richards, 5 May 1906). Contained in this moral history called Dubliners are twelve stories that deal with the paralysis of a central male