Halded as one of the most important short stories in the English language, The Dead is the final volume of Dubliners, a collection of 15 short stories by Irish novelist and poet James Joyce published in June 1914. The complex narrative of The Dead is the most famous of the collection, and Joyce is widely recognized as one of the most influential modernist writers of the 20th century. The Dead focuses on the spiritual journey of protagonist Gabriel Conroy who, while attending his aunt's annual Christmas party, has a series of encounters with three female characters, Lily, Miss Ivors and his wife, Gretta, who bring the narrative to its climax; climax; a moment of painful self-knowledge, a quality he had previously unconsciously lacked, referring to In the Dead there are; life and death; Gabriele and Gretta; male and female; past and present; young and British/European and Irish. A psychoanalytic reading also reveals self-knowledge and self-delusion, escape and entrapment as oppositional forces that torment the protagonist. These paired opposites give meaning and define the other, and are code to indicate that the world Gabriel lives in is one from which he is alienated, and that alienation is the root cause of his insecurity displayed on multiple occasions in the text. Syntagmatically; being a sequence of events that construct the narrative and convey meaning, (Berger 1998; 16) the structure of the Dead is divided into three distinct parts, that of arrival, dinner and departure. Gabriel is the unifying concept, connecting and imbuing these parts with meaning through his interactions with other characters. However, applying psychoanalytic criticism, one can see that the structure is divided into two halves, a discourse between Gabriel's conscious and unconscious, revealing that Gabriel is very different from the man he perceives himself as. These repressed thoughts, however, continue to exist and attempt to exert influence in ways that the conscious mind does not understand, including neurotic behavior, symbolism, and language. (Berger 1998; 66/67) With Gabriel, it is evident that he perceives himself as a certain character as the reader sees through his continuous display of neurotic behavior, anxiety, his desire to escape almost to a claustrophobic level, and internal monologues that he is another. Gabriel's self-delusion means that he has repressed many parts of himself, thus creating a barrier. His unconscious neurotic behaviors indicate the ongoing conflict between his consciousness and the unconscious, which paralyzes and alienates him. In the end, it is Gabriel's unconscious that reveals who he really is