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“The Dead” and “The Story of an Hour” The story of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” consists of many symbols and ironies. Kate and Julie Morkan, two elderly sisters who live with their spinster niece, are holding their annual Christmas dance. Their married nephew Gabriel Conroy, attends with his wife, and delivers an after-dinner speech. Among the guest is a tenor, Bartell D’ Arcy, who sings after much good natured prodding a ballad that affects Gabriel’s wife Gretta strangely. After the party, as they walk back in the snow to their hotel room, Gabriel experiences feelings of great passion for his wife. When he approaches her in the hotel room, however, she breaks into tears, and informs him about a former lover she had known when she lived in the country, a young boy who had died, as she believes, for her. All of Gabriel’s complacent assumptions about his own life are in a moment torn down, and yet he responds eventually with “generous tears” of understanding and creating feeling. As the snow continues to fall alike on the living and the dead, Gabriel undergoes a moment of sublime understanding. Towards the end of the story, we see how unhappy Gabriel is and can almost predict that he will leave his wife. Jame