In "The Dead," Gabriel realizes that he could never love a person the way Michael loved Gretta. Michael could not be away from Gretta, in fact, the night before she left for Dublin; he went to her and said he would not be able to live without her. After Gretta had told him the story, Gabriel thought, "He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love...He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live." (Joyce 223) He feels his soul has reached the place of the dead and that the living world is becoming nonexistent. It's almost as if he is competing with "the dead." A man, who no longer exists, has the heart of his wife.
             As Gretta sleeps, Gabriel thinks about what she has told him. He now sees his wife differently, and he watches her sleep as though he and she had never lived together. "So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life." (Joyce 222) He remembered watching his Aunt Julia sing, and the look on her face, he knew that very soon he will be going to her funeral. "He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal. Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees."(Joyce 222) Everyone slowly fades away, ' 'becoming shades.'' He thinks that perhaps it is best to boldly and passionately pass into the next world than to slowly die of old age.
             He hears the snow tapping on the window pane and knows that it is time to begin "his journey westward.'' The snow falls on everything all over Ireland, on the living and the dead. "His soul swooned sl...