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From his collection of short stories Dubliners, in “The Dead” James Joyce presents a cast of “thought-tormented” characters whose festivities are fraught, and perhaps fueled, by the specter of death. Joyce uses dialogue to portray the frenetic psyches of the revelers, and by contrast, he uses silence and awkward pauses in the dialogue to represent the revelers’ discomfort and grief toward the party-fouling mention of death.

In the end, Joyce’s protagonist Gabriel discovers that what he assumed was wistful romance in the tear-stained ruddy cheeks of his wife at the party was actually the pangs of melancholy she has silently suffered for years over her young lover, Michael Furey, who died for the love of her. Gabriel realizes that the love shown him by his wife Gretta, love that had created passionate “moments of their secret life together” that “burst like stars upon his memory,” was but a sad transference of love she had only truly felt for another; love and passion she felt for someone now dead.

Joyce hints at the final plot twist. The dead certainly have a presence at the party, and I would argue that the dead and living co-mingle in Joyce’s New Years party scene. Most of the conversation and camaraderie among the living is frenetic frivolity, lacking in substance. The characters do not seem to be talking to one another so much as they are talking for the sake of talking. The comments are rarely directed at a target. Conversation topics switch without proper response. Blather flies over each other’s heads and ricochets from the walls of the banquet—the aimless racket seems to rattle the room as would a ghost.

Gabriel offers an after-dinner speech, but just before he begins, he looks up at the chandelier and hears distant music. Those sat around the table follow his gaze, and it seems Joyce is also calling the reader’s attention to the presence of the dead, to reflect on all those whose skirts have swished to music and whose chins have dripped with the fat of a brown goose. We feast upon, and in spite of, the dead. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may…”

Joyce’s “The Dead” reminded me of a recent (2008) Japanese foreign film Departures because both reinforce this theme of celebration against the foil of mortality. In Departures, a young man lands a new job as a casket boy and learns how to prepare corpses for burial. Rather than sleeping in coffins, all day, he festoons them. After his first day adorning death, he comes home and eats like a pig, sucking the juices from dead meats as if the meal were his last. A shy man with a shy wife, that night, he cannot help himself but to ravish her passionately. In the same way, before Joyce’s Gabriel becomes aware of his Gretta’s painful secret, he is seduced by her melancholy in the gas light of a gloomy hall: “There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something.” Gabriel is turned on by grief, which he mistakes for beauty and a different kind of passion. Perhaps for both Gabriel and the casket boy, the specter of death whets the appetite for the pleasures of living.