Joycean Aesthetic Askesis

The last story in James Joyce's Dubliners, "The Dead," stands apart from the others. It is less a picture of a typical Dublin situation than a fable designed to illustrate a point. Joyce is attempting to show the change from a wholly egocentric point of view, where you regard the world as revolving round yourself, to a point of view where your own personality is eliminated and you can stand back and look disinterestedly on yourself and on the world. The hero of this story starts off in a mood of pompous egotism and, as a result of the events in the story, emerges with his personality eliminated in a mood of indifferent acceptance of all things. Written after the other stories of Dubliners and no part of the original collection, "The Dead" is a kind of afterthought expressing indirectly Joyce's preoccupation with the question of the proper aesthetic attitude. Actually, what is happening to Gabriel is that, like Stephen in the Portrait, he is moving from the "lyrical" point of view, the egocentric approach which Joyce regarded as the most immature, to the "dramatic" approach which, for Joyce was the proper aesthetic approach.

~ David Daiches, "James Joyce: The Artist As Exile," College English (1940), 202.