Thematic Analysis The Trauma of Memory in James Joyce s The Dead
A Thematic Analysis: The Trauma of Memory in James Joyce’s “The Dead” James Joyce’s “The Dead” appeared in his 1914 collection Dubliners, and was greeted with immediate acclaim. The story’s understated style may cause some readers to overlook the important messages about trauma and pain the story offers. ... Joyce’s text reveals a modernist interest in fragmentation, disillusionment, and isolation, as Gabriel and Gretta Conroy feel out of place at the Christmas party they attend and even isolated from each other’s company. As the title of the story suggests, the theme of death - both physical death and emotional death or trauma - are explored in the story. ... Thus, Joyce explores the modernist ideas of individuality, nationalism, and intellectualism throughout his text. All the themes that Joyce explores in “The Dead”, however, are linked to one overriding theme of the story. Indeed, one of the pre-eminent themes of the story is the trauma of memory, as the story deals with the traumas of national memory and the traumas of Gretta Conroy’s memory about the young boy who died of love for her. The trauma of memory is linked to nationalism in the story as Joyce evokes the trauma of Ireland’s past and the trauma of recalling that past. ... The references to politics suggests the ways that the remembered trauma of Ireland’s colonial situation in the past affects the nationalisms and ideals of Gabriel Conroy and those he comes into contact with. ... He links Ireland’s past to the practice of hospitality, rather than to the traumas of colonialism and conflict: "our country has no tradition which does it so much honour and which it should guard so jealously as that of its hospitality" (Joyce 213). ... But granted even that, it is, to my mind, a princely failing, and one that I trust will long be cultivated among us" (Joyce 213). The actions of the nationalistic Molly Ivors and the heated debates about politics during the evening prove that Gabriel’s definition and memory of Ireland’s past is misleading and even naive. It proves impossible to separate the trauma of national memory from politics. Some scholars have argued that memory was especially important for Ireland, a colonial nation trying to cope with a painful past: “memory in Ireland was deployed for radical political purposes. Memory acted as a spur to agency rather than a prop to passivity” (Whelan 61). Memory, therefore, as Whelan and others have defined it, is intensely political in Ireland, and linked to a national memory of the trauma of colonialism. The trauma of memory creates isolation and fragmentation. Memory in the story is so painful and individual that the sharing of memory creates rifts in relationships.