Impressionist art was concerned on capturing,
as the name suggests, an "impression" of a scene as it appeared at a particular time.
Artists worked especially hard to capture the quality of the light in a scene. Therefore, for
example, the impressionist painter Monet didn't simply paint one haystack that looked the way a
haystack is "supposed" to look. He painted the same or similar haystacks over and over
at different times of day, in different seasons, and in different weather conditions to capture
how a haystack looked in a specific fleeting instant. Like most impressionists, Monet was trying
to record immediate impressions of images and how they changed, not what he thought he saw or
what he was supposed to see. So if a haystack looked like a blurry smudge of white because it
was obscured by a snowstorm, that would be what Monet painted.
Post-impressionists reacted against this. They were less concerned with capturing
qualities of light andaccurately and were more concerned with using color
symbolically.
In Ennui, which takes it name from a
French word that roughly translates to existential boredom (or world weariness), Sickert is out
to capture the emotion of boredom. He shows a couple in a stifling room with no window apparent.
They are not looking at each other and seem bored with each other and life. The man is staring
out into space while smoking, and the woman is staring at a corner of a wall with her elbows on
a dresser. They have no emotional connection with each other.
This is close
to the situation at the end "The Dead." Gabriel and his wife are in a hotel room
together, but they are not emotionally connected. Gabriel is thinking lustfully about his wife,
while her mind is entirely elsewhere, remembering her former boyfriend, Michael Furey, who died
years ago. When Gabriel finds this out, he is hurt that she loved someone before him: he never
knew.
Joyce's story is closer to post-impressionism than impressionism. As a
modernist, Joyce was attempting to capture subjective emotions, rather than impressions of
images (which he did not believe was possible). We receive "The Dead" filtered through
the perceptions and feelings of Gabriel, not as told by an objective narrator. At the end of the
story, as Gabriel watches the snow fall, Joyce's point is not to describe the snowfall as a
fleeting moment but to use the snow as a symbol. It symbolizes the connection between the living
and the dead. At the end of the story, Joyce emphasizes this point as he writes:
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.
Like
the falling snow, the dead are everywhere, their shadows falling across our
lives.
