Snow Was General All Over Ireland (well...not really)

The final scene in Joyce’s Dubliners is the famous final scene in “The Dead.” After reading stories about the lack of fulfillment, paralysis, entrapment, decay, nostalgia, and angst, we come to a story called “The Dead.” Not a very hopeful sounding title, I’d say. Even so, the students, maybe because of their expectation for happy endings, wanted to see the ending of this collection as hopeful. It is a bleak landscape description of the snow falling all over Ireland, covering the living and the dead, the past and the present, equally. It has a leveling effect. Gabriel, the central character, has spent most of the story thinking about himself, having problems communicating his thoughts, and misreading his wife’s feelings. He is self-absorbed, ineffective, and unreflective. The dinner party he attended, thrown by his aging Aunts, is the same every year. The entertainments are mundane. Like the story of Johnny the horse that Gabriel tells as the party draws to a conclusion, his life seems to be going around in circles like a horse walking round and round to drive a mill. Nothing is progressive. Life seems meaningless. And yet the snow falling at the end of the story is written in beautiful prose, that some may even call poetic. The language itself seems uplifting.


Dinner scene from Joyce's "The Dead" in John Huston's film



Of course, Gabriel has had a Joycian epiphany right before the scene that ends the story, and like the unnamed character in “Araby,” he realizes the world doesn’t revolve around him. His wife has had a meaningful life before he came along, and he can’t understand her deep passions now. He realizes, tragically, that he has never loved anyone else deeply. Gabriel looks outside his window, from his tomb-like existence in the hotel room, and acknowledges the snow falling outside. The whole scene pulls back. Possibly we are in Gabriel’s head as we hear “the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (152). Maybe he is coming to grips with his own mortality, or desperately looking for the meaning of life. Maybe on some level he feels spiritually connected with all the living and the dead, a transcendent and hopeful image for sure. He may also be acknowledging that his life in Dublin is like a living death. Maybe Joyce wanted to allow the reader to find different possibilities in the ending. I have no doubt that he did. But the students in my class, who are young and full of passion, had little problem choosing the more hopeful reading of the text. And I agree, at the very least, there is an acceptance of things for what they are in Gabriel’s mind, I believe.





Early March snow in Dungarvan



So why all this talk about snow and death? We did have snow in Ireland soon after our arrival. Not much snow really. Compared to what we are currently getting in Erie, Pennsylvania, not even worth mentioning. This morning there are a few flakes in the air as well. It’s been much colder than it should be. Cold may be general, all over Ireland, but the warmer days are coming. And the few flakes in the air or on the ground all melt before 10:00. Now rain…..there’s another matter. What does it all mean? Well I guess it is how you look at it.