Reread after many long years.

"Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

"The Dead" is so brilliant because it defies the reader's expectations at every turn, leading to a powerful culmination of these vignettes of life in Dublin. Gabriel Conroy suffers a kind of imposter syndrome. Even though he is loved and respected, he understands that there is a deeper attitude and emotional world to which he doesn't belong. What could be a petty reaction to his wife's sorrow transforms into a more general meditation on death.

If Joyce has a larger project in his fiction, it is the attempt to connect the domestic and the cosmic. The retelling of The Odyssey in Ulysses is a perfect framework for this - it is all about the liminal state between the home and the larger world. Dubliners introduces this theme, as in each story it questions the meaning of home in terms of the literal hearth and the homeland of the Irish nation, the familiar trappings of Dublin city.