Stunning ending ( )

It was the annual dance of Kate and Julia Morkan, otherwise known as Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia, two small plainly-dressed old women””

Mary Jane was their only niece and Gabriel Conroy their favourite nephew.

It was a musical family. Julia was a leading soprano, and Kate gave music lessons to beginners.

Everybody came to the dance, including members of Julia’s choir, any of Kate’s pupils that were old enough, and some of Mary Janes’ pupils.

Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, did housemaid’s work for Julia and Kate, and, tonight, answered the door and helped the gentlemen guests off with their overcoats.

It was a cold winter’s night and it was snowing.

Gabriel was a “”stout, tallish young man”; his wife was called Gretta.

Gabriel and Gretta are not going back home tonight, but have booked a room at a hotel nearby.

There was a man called Freddy present who was often quite drunk, but he wasn’t too inebriated on this occasion.

Gabriel was mostly focussed on preparing in his head the speech he was going to make later and wondering whether he should quote Browning or not.

In a week or so Freddy was going to stay in a monastery. The monks never spoke, and slept in their coffins to remind themselves ”of their last end” and to make up for the sins committed by all the sinners in the outside world.

In his speech, Gabriel says they should cherish in their hearts “”the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die”.

He calls the aunts and Mary Jane the “Three Graces of the Dublin musical world”, and toasts them all three.

Gabriel and his wife leave. Gabriel is happy and recalls the moments of their life together tht no one knew of or would ever know of”. He longed to remind his wife of their moments of ecstasy.

In a letter to her he had written “Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull nd cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?”

They took a cab to their hotel. He felt lustful; he felt that they had run away together “with wild and radiant hearts to a new adventure”.

Suddenly she came over to him and kissed him.

“His heart was brimming over with happiness.”

Gretta was thinking about a song that had been sung at the party – “The Lass of Aughrim”, and then she began to cry.

She was thinking of a person long ago who used to sing that song.

Ganriel becoms angry.

“Someone you were in love with?” he asks ironically.

It was a young boy called Michael Furey. He was very delicate and had big, dark eyes.

She used to go walking with him.

Gabriel becomes jealous now.

He is dead, died when only seventeen.

While Gabriel had been full of memories of their secret life together, Gretta had been comparing him to another.

The boy was ill, in decline; Gretta wrote to him and said she was going to Dublin (to a convent), and would be back in the summer.

The night before she left, she heard gravel being thrown against the window, and it was he, Michael, shivering in the rain.

He said he did not want to live.

After she had only been a week in the convent, he died.

She sobbed and fell sleep.

The boy had died for her sake.

Gabriel thought about how Aunt Julia too would soon be a “shade””.

“One by one, they were all becoming shades.”

“Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”

Gabriel’s eyes filled with tears. He had never himself felt like the boy did towards any woman, and he knew that feeling must be love.

Gabriel’s soul had approached “that region where dwelt --- the dead””.

He felt like the “solid world” was “dissolving and dwindling”.

The snow was falling over all Ireland, also on the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey was buried. The snow was falling “upon all the living and the dead”.

Thus Gabriel’s lust changed to anger, then jealousy, and finally to compassion for the dead young man, compassion for his love, and loss of the girl, Gretta, now Gabriel’s wife., and her loss of him.

I found this to be a wonderfully expressed story, full of emotion and understanding.

Gabriel had found new empathy for the dead and for those left behind. ( )

Often cited as the best work of short fiction ever written, Joyce's story details a New Year's Eve gathering in Dublin that is so evocative and beautiful that it prompts the protagonist's wife to make a shocking revelation to her husband—closing the story with an emotionally powerful epiphany that is considered one of the best in modern literature.

First James Joyce book I’ve ever read. Wasn’t what I was expecting. Really liked the style of writing. ( )

La maravilla de las maravillas dentro del género del cuento ( )