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Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Get (post)script episodes by becoming a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. The conversation continues on our after-show (post)script. To get a free t-shirt with your first order, head over to /subtext. Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, Buck Mason. How might the virtue of hospitality include the need to incorporate difficult feelings about our families, our homelands, and ourselves? And is the story’s ending, with its incorporative vision of snow falling on both the living and the dead, hopeful or hopeless? Wes & Erin discuss. Gabriel preaches about Irish hospitality in his after-dinner speech but does not realize that he will grapple with a stranger of sorts later that night. It takes place chiefly at a party in the home of the elderly Morkan Sisters on the Feast of the Epiphany, and fittingly its central character, the Morkans’ nephew, Gabriel Conroy, will have his own epiphanic experience by the story’s end. His efforts to rectify this omission resulted in “The Dead,” the book’s final story. In 1906, presumably finished with his short story collection Dubliners, James Joyce wrote to his brother with dissatisfaction that, though he set about to create a comprehensive portrait of Ireland’s capital city, he had not managed to render its famous, unrivaled hospitality.

James joyce the dead text