The Dead
by James Joyce(1914)
Short Storyc. 35 pages
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
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One great work, every day
by James Joyce(1914)
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
James Joyce(1914)
The final story in Dubliners, written last but placed last by design, is sometimes called the greatest short story ever written. Gabriel Conroy attends his aunts' annual party, delivers a speech, and afterward learns that his wife once loved a boy who died for her. The snow falling over all of Ireland in the final paragraphs is one of literature's most famous images. Joyce captures a whole society, a whole tradition, on the verge of transformation, and the pathos of Gabriel's limited self-knowledge. Fifteen thousand words that contain a world.