The effect of reading this story, as we follow its main character, Gabriel Conroy, from a dark winter’s night into the noise and light of his aunts’ party and then later back out into the darkness, where he ends up in a silent hotel room, watching snow fall and struggling with his thoughts, is like seeing Bede’s sparrow fly into the banqueting hall from darkness and out the other side into darkness again. By the end, life, with all its light and conviviality, its difficulties and tension, seems fragile and temporary.
The story begins with activity and music. As Gabriel arrives at the party, his aunts rush backwards and forwards anxiously, worrying about who has come and whether they can manage a guest who’s likely to arrive drunk. There are a large number of guests and Joyce manages the intensity of Gabriel’s various interactions with them effortlessly, interspersing moments of acute embarrassment, anger and boredom with the movement of dancers and the sound of other voices.
The contrast between those scenes and the silence of the hotel room later is stark. And the end of the story, where Gabriel’s mood turns from intense desire for his wife to anger and then sadness as he finds her preoccupied with a song she heard earlier in the evening, which reminded her of Michael Furey, a boy who once loved her, but died very young, and whose death she feels partly responsible for, because he visited her in the rain when he was ill, is beautiful and intensely moving, especially as Gabriel finds himself almost seeing the land of the dead:
“The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.”
First published in Dubliners by James Joyce, Grant Richards Ltd, 1915 and later by Grafton Books, 1977. Read online here
