In the following essay, Garrett offers six perspectives on "The Dead" by applying the principles of six different literary theories.

BIOGRAPHY. Joyce once said of one section of Ulysses, "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant." Similarly, he inserted in his writings remnants of his own life and environment, so that scholars scour the details of his experience, and the people and places that he knew, for clues to the meaning of his work.

The most famous example in "The Dead" is the tragic love that Nora Barnacle knew in Galway when she was not quite sixteen years old, before she moved to Dublin, met Joyce, and ran off with him. Joyce was jealous of his dead rival, but Nora remembered the love fondly. In a conversation years later she spoke on...