The last story is “The Dead”. It is the climax of all the other stories. In this story is frequently the use of symbols. For Joyce it represents a new, more conscious, view of reality. In particular in the end of the story, that there is an elevation of symbolic and lyrical intensity.

"The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

 A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspaper were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

 This is the end of the story. The characters are Gabriel and Gretta. Gabriel is an intelligent and successful journalist but he is very unhappy. He doesn’t succed to take the decision also for the smallest things. In this passage, after a party he, with his wife Gretta, go back to their hotel in Dublin. He is attracted by his wife and he wants to approche her. But she startes to cry. Then he discovers that she has an old lover. He feels umiliated and frustrated and in this moment there is the “epiphany”. It isrepresented by the view of Michael Furey's ghost, that died for her.

The epiphany is in intuition, a revelation, and in front of its there are two different reactions:

- escape

- paralysis

 But Gabriel didn’t have a clear reaction. We can not understand how Gabriel reacts: if he escape and resolves his problems travelling in eastward; or if he lives in a state of paralysis and remains umiliated and frustrated. But certainly at the end he abandons his jealousy, frustration and fells elevated by the world of spirit. This world units the living and the dead in the death. The snow is the symbol of  this union, in front of the death there aren’t differences between the living and the dead.