SOURCE: Pearce, Sandra Manoogian. “Snow through the Ages: Echoes of ‘The Dead’ in O'Brien, Lavin, and O'Faolain.” In Joyce through the Ages: A Nonlinear View, pp. 165-78. Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 1999.

In the following essay, Pearce explores the influence of Joyce's seminal short story “The Dead” on O'Brien, Mary Lavin, and Sean O'Faolain, maintaining that these three authors “build upon imagery of snow or fire in their short stories to present unrelievedly pessimistic world visions, far more bitter than Joyce's that demonstrate their permanent loss of hope in a postlapsarian world.”

“[Gabriel's] soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (D, 224). These final lines of the last short story in Dubliners, forming what is arguably one of the most lyrical passages in prose fiction...