"The Dead", de James Joyce, desde la narratología

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine some of the problems that arise from a reading of Joyce’s story "The Dead". The narrator cleverly camouflages the laws that govern and construct the text but at the same time introduces signs that help the reader to rearticulate the material on the basis of the writer’s hypothetical starting point. Like all good texts, "The Dead" contains its own commentary, but we discover it retroactively; indeed, our reading progresses not only via continuity and accumulation, but via equivalence and opposition: dual symmetries, anticipatory echoes, incidents that recur, words which return now without their former literality but bearing a figurative meaning, antithetic correlations... These devices create the constant circularity of the discourse, expressing metalinguistically the closed world, dead to the future, of which we are witnesses.