Exhuming the Monks of Mount Melleray from "The Dead"

Quinlan discusses "The Dead", a Dubliners' story in which James Joyce celebrates Irish hospitality following his scrupulously mean treatment of his country, his city, and its paralyzed inhabitants in the earlier narratives of the collection. The monks are first warmly commended for their hospitality; then they are depicted as sleeping in their coffins, but, by realistic implication at least, they rise from those coffins each night at 2:00 A.M. to praise their Creator and to begin the new day, feeling joyful in their chosen state though, no doubt, it seems "lugubrious" to the outside world (D 201). Their habits are similar to the narrative of "The Dead" as a whole since it moves from a celebration of Irish hospitality to celery-eating, monk-like Gabriel (who lives in Monkstown) "stretching himself cautiously along under the sheets" and listening to "the snow falling faintly through the universe like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead" (D 223, 224).