SOURCE: Roos, Bonnie. “James Joyce's ‘The Dead’ and Bret Harte's Gabriel Conroy: The Nature of the Feast.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 15, no. 1 (spring 2002): 99-126.

In the following essay, Roos traces the influences of American writer Bret Harte's novel Gabriel Conroy on Joyce's story, “The Dead.”

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

—Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal,” 1729

“Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”

—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1914

Toward the end of James Joyce's “The Dead” (1907), Gabriel Conroy's wife Gretta cries herself to sleep after telling her husband about Michael...