James Joyce’s “the Dead” vs. John Updike’s a&P

James Joyce’s “The Dead” is very different from John Updike’s “A&P”.   The dead resembles exactly that of the title, within characters, mood, and settings.   The story is told in the third person about the Eve of the Epiphany but has no plot or explanation of events.   John Updike's “A&P” is told in the first person and is about a very interesting event in a Grocery store north of Boston.   The story moves with color and explanation.   The two main characters of the stories are also very different.   Gabriel Conroy is a very educated man and presently writes a column for a newspaper.   Sammy is a typical teenager and speaks informally and often in slang terms.   Although the two stories are very different they do have a common factor.   The stories main characters’, “The Dead” Gabriel Conroy and “A&P” Sammy, have an epiphany at the end.   In this essay I will discuss the differences in the two stories and the Epiphanies at the end.
‘‘The Dead’’ can be categorized with stories that are in the realist tradition.   Joyce presents life as it is without making a sensational plot or interpreting events.   In "The Dead,'' Joyce, for the most part, shows but does not tell.   The setting is often described in a gloomy way.   Death is constantly brought up in conversation between the characters and plays an important role in the Story.   Gabriel honors death in his after-dinner speech, and several dead characters are mentioned during the story: Ellen (Gabriel's mother), Pat Morkan (his uncle), Patrick Morkan (his grandfather), and Michael Furey.   Michael Furey particularly inspires Gabriel to a fuller self-awareness.   Gabriel realizes after Gretta tells him of Michael's love for her that inevitably he and everyone he knows is going to die.   Hence it is better to live life fully rather than passively.   Another reminder of death comes in the dinnertime discussion of a monastery whose monks sleep in coffins.   The "dead'' of the title are both those who are literally deceased and those who... [continues]

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