Deconstructing James Joyce's The Dead

James Joyce leaves much to interpretation when crafting his short story, "The Dead;" in creating the ambiguously motivated character of Gabriel Conroy - a name borrowed from Bret Harte's earlier novel bearing the namesake - his intentions seem rare, deliberate, yet difficult to pin down. This, in turn, leaves his work to be viewed in a poststructuralist sense. By deconstructing the multiple implications of definitive yet indefinite scenarios, one may "read" the text in a myriad of ways. By using the deconstructionist approach, the story itself, along with its protagonist as well as its author, change rapidly and continually, leaving no one interpretation inferior to another, but merely corollary.

While Gabriel Conroy's true motivations are masked throughout the story by an omniscient narrator, his actions beg consequence, and his mannerisms give way to his raw emotion. Joyce also implements the use of ulterior action, such as subtle narration, back stories, antagonists, and Mother Nature. These characteristics, combined with the careful interpretation of underlying text, help to provide the reader with opposing, yet correlated, conceptions of Joyce's intentions for Gabriel in "The Dead."