An Analysis of The Dead To begin in the most unlikely place, we have here another version of family life in Ireland (moving eastwards, and from here through The Snapper forms a unity in contrast to the previous), with another way of painting what the Irish consider their insularity and insularity, their ridiculous desire for union with the apparently superior but alien culture of the "continent", and above all that confusion and torment over sexuality that stems so directly from the Irish Church's inability to reconcile desire as sin and desire as life-affirming. Fact (at least according to a major recent survey): Married Catholics have better sex than other married Americans. Why? It has been suggested that the analogy between the union of man and woman with the union of Christ and his Church and of man with God cannot be preached so fully without giving a celebratory twist to conjugal love. But this would be inconceivable to the Irish, whose church (despite having a dominant influence on American Catholicism) focuses on asceticism and the equation of sex with sin. In a sense, because he is so firmly rooted in this tradition, struggling against However, Joyce seems at once hopelessly dated and eternal: hopelessly dated because we do not have enough remnants of the sense of sin in our culture to make it a force against which we must fight , and eternal because it remains true for all. That transition to adulthood (especially through adolescence) means in some way dealing with what is a line of conflict between sexuality as self-aggrandizing and aggressive and emotional life as it is not self-centered and self-centered and in some cases more "pure" sense. Of course it is possible to come to terms with this contradiction, but it is also possible to understand it and be weakened by its existence, and Gabriel is a clear example of a person who cannot reconcile the simple physical desire for his beloved wife, reason to 'get closer and take', with equally simple adoration and affection for her in the grace and authenticity of her autonomy, a reason to 'stand back and in a certain sense give' (I read two passages from Portrait, 171, on the contrary 99-101). So Gabriel is troubled by what strikes us terribly strangely as his moments of pure and "clownesque" "lust", and