“The Dead”: Gabriel’s Epiphany and His Evolving Self

In this essay, I elucidate the cognitive-developmental dimension of Gabriel’s epiphany in James Joyce’s short story from Dubliners, “The Dead.” Joycean epiphany was once treated as merely Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic theory in much of Stephen Hero and in part of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce himself, or via his brother Stanislaus Joyce, said that the epiphany is a literary means to expose his characters to self-contradiction and make them realize truths they are self-deceptively blind to. I reevaluate Gabriel’s changed perception of his wife Gretta—the crux of his epiphany—from the perspective of family process on the level of cognitive science. One of the great findings by Jean Piaget and his neo-Piagetians is that people may change their cognitive structures to adapt to new experience. What is significant in cognitive structural change in this instance is the intellectual leap pushed by emotions and anxiety. In “The Dead,” Gabriel displays a hypersensitive personality, a sign of his high degree of emotional dependence on others. His anxiety in public life spills over into domestic life, disrupting the marital relationship between him and his wife. This emotional pressure, pushed to the limit by finding his wife’s distancing from him as she recollects her dead lover Michael Furey, is too great for him to cope. His epiphanic moment comes about when he is forced to choose between the narcissistically self-deluding self and the objectively self-evaluating self once awakened to a new ironic reality—that she has had an existence separate from him and hitherto emotionally and cognitively incomprehensible to him. He finally frees himself from his self-delusive constraints and objectively assesses himself and, in turn, accepts his wife’s individuality as a being of free will, evolving in Piagetian terms into a more intellectually and emotionally mature person.