Ashes, Ashes, Snow Falls Down...?

Thickly drifted indeed, and the reader is set down, slowly, quietly, faintly,
like a  snowflake  at the  descent of their last end

The final passage of "The Dead" is certainly the most difficult to wrestle with in the entire collection.  The serenity of the final sequence and epiphany contrasts sharply with the narrative elements leading up to it.  I looked over an essay I had written last year to see how my thinking may have changed after reading the entirety of Dubliners.  Here is an excerpt:

"...In Araby, the protagonist goes from error to error, first idealizing his attraction to Mangan’s sister and then seeing himself as a “creature driven and derided by vanity” (24).  In a similar way, Gabriel first is frustrated with his wife by Michael Furey and grudgingly takes part in reverence of ancestors in the family gathering.  He then sees himself as a “ludicrous figure […] idealizing his own clownish lusts” (188-9) and yields to the legacy of the dead.  But in Araby, the problem is the conception of the world – there is some cultural institution obstructing his view.  The protagonist sees events in terms of heroism or vanity, or virtue and sin – but does not question whether such a dichotomy is valid for his romantic pursuits.  Gabriel does not challenge the image of Michael Furey as a tragic hero beyond a few words after it becomes clear that his wife idealizes him.  “Gabriel, humiliated by failure of his irony” (188) simply accepts his wife’s idealization without question.  In context of the book and with knowledge of the author, it seems that the reader should understand that the image of Michael Furey is being mocked (and especially along with those who accept that image).  A fragile boy in the gasworks dies and is thought of as a hero.  Joyce rejects this.  Death coupled with grand notions of service and love aren’t (or shouldn’t be) so important.  The dead are stifling, according to Joyce, only because they are made so..."

I was caught up in this idea of a false epiphany - that none of the characters ever come closer to the truth, demonstrating societal paralysis.  I remember even when writing this I knew that my view went against the conventional read of the story, which was that at long last, a suggestion of redemption was given by Gabriel's realization of his own foolishness.

My reading of the narrative elements of the story has not changed significantly because of the context of Gabriel's epiphany is seriously suspect, beyond the reasons given above.  Taking the long view, he is emotionally cuckolded by a dead lover, and right after the supposed inflection point of self-realization ("...as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife" (284)) and humility, he immediately returns to thinking of her sexually, rationalizing his failure to be the romantic hero with her decline in beauty with age.  He again returns to thinking of his own failures at the party, denying his wife any agency within the emotional dynamic of the relationship.  When he finally decides that he knows his strange swirl of emotions is "must be love" (286) is the reader not to remember the boy of Araby and his dream of being the chivalric hero?  Is Gabriel not doing the same by looking at Michael Furey as the knight who passed "boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion" (285) and blaming Greta's distance on his relative complacency?  The concrete elements of "The Dead" point in the same direction as the other stories.

My reading as a whole has changed, however, because of the tone, imagery, and one line about the snow in particular.  There is a morbid serenity surrounding the snow's falling, that "the solid world...was dissolving and dwindling", "he watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight," etc.(286)  As others have picked up on, there is no masking language, only seemingly emotionally sincere diction that contrasts with Gabriel's actual thoughts.  The one line that tips the reading: "[The snow] lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns" (286).  If the snow represents death, the "crooked crosses", representing flawed religion, were buried most thickly, as well as the biblical image of barren thorns, which combine two different spiritual impediments in the parable of the 'fertile soil'.  The snow is not necessarily redemptive, but it is purifying, in that after freezing off the dead, the traditions, religion, all of Ireland that is covered by the snow - spring can come.  

(I'm not sure how else "The Dead" can be read as hopeful, being that there is no progress in any of the characters, unless we can conclude that Gabriel actually came to love Greta after this episode.)