Though seemingly just a simple story, "The Dead" that ends James Joyce's Dubliners inspires for it reveals a dialectical relationship between life and death at an annual Christmas party. By referring to Freud's idea of the "uncanny," this paper on the one hand aims to decode Joyce's dual strategy in writing and analyze how he constructs and deconstructs at the same time the Trish hospitality, how he reviews the sentiments and insincerity of people via the doubleness of the uncanny, and how he criticizes the psychic paralysis of the Irish people under the British colonial rule as living death. On the other hand, Joyce's idea of "writing as mirroring" will be appropriated to illustrate how light and shadow are deployed to debunk Gabriel's vanity and narcissism and to explicate the mutually constituted self and other, and how Gabriel's psychological transformation and liberation are triggered by the power of music during his journey to "the west." To conclude, the unconditional acceptance of the other out of the Derridean spirit of hospitality highlights the redemption of love in the struggle of life and death as represented in Joyce's oblique yet revealing authorship of the story.
