Gabriel Conroy: The Unheralded Icon of Millennial Existential Angst Oscar Williams College

Joycean critics frequently encourage the uninitiated to read Joyce with an emotional detachment. Scholars are taught to marvel at the aesthetic complexity of his prose with an “almost religious attitude”, under the dictatorial guidance of modernists like Gustave Flaubert, who believe that the truth of a novel “derives only from its impersonality” and should “be held together by the strength of its style” (Rabaté 3-4). However, this discourse often gets lost in the formal qualities of the text and excludes emotional responses. One such peculiar emotional resonance is that between the tortured, conflicted protagonist of The Dead, Gabriel Conroy, and millennial readers, a generation who have also “inherited a world without being able to live in it” (Tolentino).

There is a timeless quality to Joyce’s Dublin, appearing as a “snow-stiffened frieze”, with “snow falling faintly through the universe” (Joyce). The snow has an ethereal quality that transcends Dublin from its contextual surroundings, suspending time and encapsulating Dublin in a metaphorical snow globe. It suggests a universality of experience, and as Ezra Pound notes “he gives us things as they are, not only for Dublin, but for every city” (20). Gabriel becomes not only...