SOURCE: "'The Dead' and the Generosity of the Word," in PMLA, Vol. 101, No. 2, March, 1986, pp. 233-45.

In the following essay, Pecora approaches the question of whether Gabriel acquires a level of self-understanding at the close of "The Dead," maintaining that Gabriel "in no way overcomes or transcends the conditions of his existence."

Headed toward death, language turns back upon itself; it encounters something like a mirror; and to stop this death which would stop it, it possesses but a single power: that of giving birth to its own image in a play of mirrors that has no limits.

Michel Foucault, "Language to Infinity"

James Joyce's story is opened by a "caretaker's daughter"; filled with the physically aging, the psychologically repressed, and the emotionally arrested; and closed in a flurry of bewildered sensation and "confused adoration" that recalls in one way or another nearly every preceding story in Dubliners...