After the Epiphany: Gabriel Conroy, Gabriel Conroy, and the Journey Westward

On January 7, 1904, James Joyce wrote the manuscript of his essay "A Portrait of the Artist." Submitted to a new journal called Dana, it was rejected, but subsequently provided the seed for Stephen Hero and, later, A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man. Richard Ellmann properly calls the piece "the extraordinary beginning of Joyce's mature work," adding that it demonstrates characteristics of an essay but also of "an autobiographical story that mixed admiration for himself with irony."¹ The date Joyce penned on the manuscript essay may not be as widely celebrated as the one, a little more than five months later, June 16—the "sacred day" Joyce first went walking with Nora Barnacle and later immortalized as "Bloomsday."² Nevertheless, January 7, 1904, deserves noting: the day after the Feast of the Epiphany, it is now generally accepted as the most likely date when in the early-morning hours Gabriel Conroy looks out from his room in the Gresham Hotel on the snow falling on "all the living and the dead" at the end of the concluding story in Dubliners.³

Like Gabriel Conroy, "stretched … cautiously along under the sheets … beside his wife" (D 176), readers of Dubliners may experience something akin to his mortal sense of paralysis about the looming future at the end of "The Dead." They remain divided, and quite properly so, about how exactly to understand Gabriel Conroy's declaration that the "time had come for him to set out on his journey westward" (D 176). Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that readers wrestle with a number of distinct possible meanings for that imagined future journey, critically at loose ends rather than completely paralyzed. Those who have written about the scene are certainly not in any agreement.⁴ Does Gabriel's "journey westward" point to a sense of his impending death, and his resignation to the feeling here in the Gresham Hotel that his life is as good as over, that all he really has to look forward to is, like the good monks at Mount Melleray, his "last end" (D 158)?⁵ Or does the prospect of journeying to Michael Furey's (and Gretta's) Galway betoken, instead, Gabriel's latter desire to reclaim for himself the bold selflessness of their young love? Or is he considering the appeal of the passionate Gaelic nationalism espoused earlier by Molly Ivors, who looks to Galway and the Aran Islands as the idealized western geography of true Irish identity, what Luke Gibbons has termed the "mystique of the West as a replacement for the compromised modernity of the East"?⁶ Or is the West of Ireland, in the words of Ellmann, "connected in Gabriel's mind with a dark and rather painful primitivism, an aspect of his country which he has steadily abjured" and which Joyce later in 1904 himself notably abjured "by going off to the continent."⁷

Like so much in Joyce's writings, these options may best be read as compacted, coexisting, syntactically joined by "ands" rather than "ors." Yet the crucial question remains: Is Gabriel resigned to his "last end," or is he—like Stephen at the end of Portrait, or Bloom at the end of Ulysses—on the threshold of a new beginning, perhaps one he has not yet fully imagined? Do Joyce's last paragraphs emphasize Gabriel's recumbent "cautiously" under the sheets as he tries to escape the chill of the room? Or should we accord more weight to the impulse to "pass boldly into that other world," and to read his "generous tears" as penitential signs that he is ready to face his impending "journey westward" (D 176)?

Gabriel's self-conscious response to his epiphany—and we can agree that the epiphany is his and not just ours—at the Gresham Hotel shares with a number of other less-introspected characters in Dubliners a patent uncertainty about where, or even how, to choose to act. But because Gabriel is a thoughtful, if admittedly anxious, adult, his condition is tonally different...