God is dead

Is there ever a moment where the odds are stacked against someone so much, that they have the right to give up? Cormac McCarthy would say no. In his novel The Road, McCarthy tells the story of a man and his son slogging across the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the United States. In this ashen wasteland, morality is almost completely absent, with the man and the boy being some of the only characters the reader sees who have even an ounce of goodness within them. The others are murderers and…

power. Christianity suggests that if you lead a virtuous life according to God, you will be rewarded with eternal life in Heaven, and if you don’t, you will be punished. The Bible presents the idea of reward and punishment as a cycle that can never be truly aligned to the virtues that Christianity demands but inconsistently rewards. David is someone who follows the virtues of Christianity closely, but decides to go against God in pursuit of his happiness and have a son with a married woman,…

“Eveline’s Visitant” by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and “The Dead” by James Joyce are both short stories that show strong examples of a “haunting”. A haunting is something or someone from a past time that reoccurs in appearance or in thought, usually bad or regrettable. Although both stories represent a haunting throughout the story, each author efficiently portrays two separate types of a haunting: one being a ghost, and one being a past. Braddon’s short story “Eveline’s Visitant” tells a tale of…

Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist of sorts within “The Dead,” is noted as the “favourite” nephew by his aunts (Joyce 152). Gabriel therefore served as the patriarch of the family after many of his elder relatives have passed away. His mother, Ellen, is noted by his aunts to have been “the brains carrier of…

Throughout his short story “A Little Cloud,” James Joyce considers the ramifications of remaining sedentary in Dublin through his characters Little Chandler and Ignatius Gallaher. That Little Chandler and Gallaher seem so antithetical, despite their proximity and similar upbringings, invites the reader to question whether Joyce intends to insinuate that success is only possible outside of Dublin, and that ambition and Celtic nationalism are incongruous. Having left Ireland at twenty years old,…

James Joyce’s Dubliners, a collection of short stories, examines Irish life in the late nineteeth century and early twentieth century through the use of complex characters and multifacteted plots. Three of these stories, “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” “A Mother,” and “Grace,” focuse exclusively on public life. In Joyce’s eyes, public life in Dublin was run by politics, art, and religion. While each of these stories takes on a different subtopic of public life, they share an overarching theme.…

To best understand this, one must examine the text and Gabriel’s actions within it. Throughout “The Dead,” Gabriel works to live an admirable and generous life for those around him, striving to be personable, respected, and refined. However, occasionally, light shines through the cracks in his character. In his first interaction with Lily, when he asks her about possible wedding plans, she replies “with great bitterness.” Gabriel is caught off guard; his first response is to “reaffirm the…

paralysis, as well as the symbols of yellow and brown, and the motif of death. His last story The Dead is the be-all end-all of the collection. It is regarded as perhaps Joyce’s greatest story, and it encompasses all his previous…

Based on the reading The Dead by James Joyce, men are being categorized as the ultimate authority that has to deal with certain precautions and always be aware and is responsible for society’s behavior. Gabriel Conroy, the main character, is having a nicely dinner with his aunts Kate and Julia while having as company other neighbors and friends. This event, made possible by the two aunts, causes certain discomfort around the main character and a few of their guests as they start discussing…

sitting in the same drawing-room dressed in black”, foreshadowing that soon in time death will come for one of them and he would be at their funeral. Additionally, when the speaker says “listening to her deep-drawn breath” explaining that she is not dead yet. Gabriel , the husband, is curious as to why the wife was mad and he tried to decipher it by looking at the clues in the messy room. The imagery of the room helps explain the amount of tension during the fight Gabriel and her had earlier.…