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Ireland, Literature, and Truth: Heideggerian Themes in “The Dead”
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Ahmet Süner
Published/Copyright:
July 14, 2009
Abstract
This paper investigates the strategies of language-use in James Joyce's “The Dead” and the relationship between these strategies and the prominent themes of the story, such as subjectivity, nationalism and literature. Using a Heideggerian approach, it understands the story as a series of linguistic incidents and encounters, in which Gabriel Conroy is made to think upon the relations among himself, others and the nation, as an abstraction to which both he and others are supposed to belong. The narrative quest in the story is to have an authentic experience of language that indeed occurs at the end of the story in the form of epiphany, with all the force and suggestivity of Heideggerian event (Ereignis), when Joyce's writing opens up a world in the Heideggerian sense: Ireland covered in snow. But the ending does not provide a resolution to the questions of subjectivity and its relation to the nation; rather it suggests a ground, i. e. literature, with respect to which such questions become secondary and relative. The story may then be viewed as an ode to the powers of literature to affect, to encompass, to resonate.
Published Online: 2009-07-14
Published in Print: 2009-June
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