Date Published:

Abstract:

Joyce’s “The Dead” contains a number of partial and misleading narratives related in an unexpected manner, and as such greatly rewards a narrative centered analysis. Misinterpretation is general in this work; one might argue that the text is primarily a record of Gabriel’s repeated misinterpretations of the people and narratives around him. This is true of the women he interacts with; most egregiously, he does not even imagine that his wife has a story independent of her life with him. An attention to narrative and interpretation in turn leads to a different reading of the ending of the text. Far from being a definitive epiphany that finally reveals the bitter truth about himself and his marriage, Gabriel's closing convictions are yet additional misinterpretations about his marriage, his situation, and his life, and rather Romantic ones at that, which the reader trained by this text would be wise to question and reject in favor of a more skeptical conclusion. In addition, the kind of third-person narration with a single focalizer for nearly all the text lends itself to the kind of misleading narration which Margot Norris has identified; this strategy of narration reproduces and even re-enacts the text’s larger hermeneutical dramas, as the reader is challenged to see though a rhetoric that naturalizes an ideological perspective that seems untroubled by imperial rule.

August 2023: Brian Richardson is a Professor in the English Department of the University of Maryland and former president of the Joseph Conrad Society of America. He is the author of several books, including Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (2006); A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-first Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives (2019), and The Reader in Modernist Fiction (2024). He is the editor or co-editor of many volumes, including Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices (2009) and a special issue of Conradiana on “Conrad and the Reader” (2002). He has written numerous articles and book chapters on 20^th-century authors, especially Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett, in which he discusses class, voice, interpretation, plot, closure, the sense of touch, the reader, character, and the narratives of literary history. He is currently completing a book on Joseph Conrad and the making of modernist fiction. Website https://brianerichardson.weebly.com

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