As the snow fell on Dublin, it was almost as if the city and its inhabitants would remain frozen together. Dublin and all it stood for would survive, while the lives of its citizens would go on, never managing to escape the city's grasp. One man in particular sat dejectedly looking out the window at the sad, frozen world. Gabriel Conroy's elaborate and sophisticated life, as he saw it, seemed to have broken free from his control. The world as he had imaginably created began to disintegrate, leaving with him generous tears falling from his eyes. James Joyce, the author of the unremarkable epics of the common people of Dublin found in Dubliners, places prodigious emphasis on his finale, The Dead. Here Joyce attempts to convey to the audience a moment of epiphany in Gabriel's life, a moment that fills Gabriel's eyes with generous tears. Gabriel Conroy contains the traits of the protagonists of the stories that lead to The Dead. Class conscious, socially awkward, short-tempered and love-frustrated; Gabriel is a complex case, dealing with the annual social gathering that takes place within the story. Ultimately, Gabriel is stricken with grief and comes to a cold conclusion after his interactions with the tale's numerous characters. While the tears may seem like an attempt to gain audience sympathy, the real point is whether the Gabriel shown towards the end of the story is different from the Gabriel at the beginning. Rather than a change in his behavior, interactions throughout the story paint Gabriel's new outlook on life. Through analysis of Gabriel's thoughts and desires during the annual party held by his aunts Kate and Julia Morkan, the audience digests the...... middle of paper... Gabriel saw it, he would have realized of every person in the world in which he had once felt so important. Generous tears would soon fall from Gabriel's eyes as he sat looking out the window watching the snow fall on Dublin. Life had been understood as a measure of the impact one leaves, by which Gabriel's life had not been as profound as he had always been convinced. “His soul slowly fainted as he felt the snow fall faintly across the universe and fall faintly, like the descent of their final end, upon all the living and the dead.” (249) Death, just like the snow that evening, would fall on everyone and Gabriel was left in tears knowing that his life was so empty compared to that of his wife's first lover. All that would be left to people would be the shadow they leave in the world, Gabriel's, darker than the others.