The article on deconstruction in “The Dead†really sparked my interest, especially with the ideas of repetition and chiasmus. I hadn’t noticed all the little details of wording before, so it was good to go back and see all these passages that related to one another in ways I hadn’t previously thought of.
One thing this article made me think about in particular was how the beginning and the ending of the story relate to each other. “The Dead†is both the title of the story as well as the final line, so in a way the story ends in the same place that it started. Furthermore, from the beginning until the end, outwardly nothing has changed. The party went on as it always does, and afterwards everything returns to the way it was before. The only change is on the inside, because Gabriel now knows about Michael Furey, which he didn’t before. Also, Gabriel is a character that is “presented as literally alive in the story but who can be said to be figuratively dead†(223). Thus, his being figuratively dead yet literally alive at the end of the story also relates back to the beginning, where “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet†(21), in which case the terms “literally†and “figuratively†seemed to be interchanged to add emphasis to the phrase—the same way one might say that Gabriel is “literally†dead in some way, to emphasize his figurative death.
If this is really the case, and the end of “The Dead†is circular and brings us right back to the beginning, then what exactly could we say has happened? Has Gabriel, or any of the characters, evolved or changed in some way, or are they all exactly the same as they were before the party, the same as they were before last year’s party, and the one before that, and the very first one thirty years ago? As is the case with deconstruction, the text can support both views. Gabriel’s character, from beginning to end, makes everything about himself, even something that has nothing to do with him, such as in this statement towards the end: “He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love†(59). Thus, even at the end, we could say that he hadn’t really changed at all from the beginning. However, in the same paragraph there is also evidence that his attitude might be changing: “His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world†(59). Is this really Gabriel seeing beyond his own identity, or is it merely him once again applying his identity to everything that is outside himself?
The final sentence, also, can be used as evidence for both cases. Gabriel himself and the universe—and everyone else in that universe, living and dead—are juxtaposed in the very last line, so either interpretation—or perhaps both—could well be right. “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†(59).