The ending of The Dead

"He thought" is one of the dullest statements in fiction - it's almost a cardinal rule that we convey literary fiction through action, dialogue, and description - and to a much lesser extent through rumination and exposition. James Joyce's The Dead, the final story (or novella) in "Dubliners," breaks the rules and breaks the convention: the entire final section of this justly famous story takes place in the mind of the protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, as he observes, infers, and to a degree elicits information: what he learns through these observations and reflections is a complete reorganizing of his life, he sees himself as fatuous and crude, his poetic and artistic yearnings as absurd, and he learns through inference that his wife, Gretta, had loved a young man who died for love - a passion that Gabriel can never feel or evoke. Joyce conveys all this so subtly and beautifully, with great understatement, that it feels natural and flowing - it's not "stream of consciousness," but it feels as if we are within the stream of Gabriel's thoughts and memories. We might expect that he would use this information to completely turn around his life, to come to some grand conclusion that will end his marriage or worse - but that's not Joyce's way, he never builds toward an ending but just presents a bit of a life almost as if in real time - he's not so much a modernist, in Dubliners, as the last naturalist. The ending of the story, Gabriel reflecting on the snow covering all of Ireland, falling on the living and dead, has been probably over-interpreted - but it's definitely part of Joyce's reflection and comnmentary on his homeland, his disgust with the sense of self-importance and stupefaction that he seems to have loathed (yet been drawn to) in so many Dubliners of his time. The end of The Dead shows why Dubliners feels like such a dark and hopeless book - with all the new information Gabriel has, he can do nothing except slide into his own darkness, waiting to be buried by the white snow.