SOURCE: "Distant Music: Sound and the Dialogics of Satire in 'The Dead,"' in James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2, Winter, 1991, pp. 473-83.

In the following essay, Avery proposes that close attention to the language used in "The Dead" reveals a crucial separation of the narrative voice from that of the main character, Gabriel

"The Dead" stands in curious relation to the other stories of Dubliners, Joyce added it late to the collection, after a letter of May 5, 1906, to Grant Richards, in which Joyce declares his intention to write "a chapter in the moral history" of Ireland (Letters of James Joyce, vol. II, 1966). "The Dead" does not seem to share the same moral perspective as the stories comprising the original version of Dubliners. On the contrary—Ellmann, citing the evidence of the letters, asserts that Joyce "had to come to a more indulgent view of Ireland" (James Joyce, 1982; Letters...