Comparison of Dubliners and the LighthouseIn Dubliners and the Lighthouse, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf explore the depressing results of lives devoid of growth or meaning compared to those who dare to live their lives in spite of all conflicts and all adversities. Both Joyce and Woolf worry about the absurdity of stagnant lives, the former operating in pre-World War I Ireland, the latter in England during and after the war. Both “The Dead” and To the Lighthouse reveal the despair of lives that occupy but do not fill the short time between birth and inevitable death. With “The Dead,” Joyce takes his complaints about the fate of Ireland to a depressing but strangely peaceful level. conclusion. Like all previous Dubliners stories, "The Dead" gives the reader a strong dose of the social depravity of an Ireland torn apart by internal war. Everyone in the story seems so absorbed in the memory of the faded glory of the past that the living have become even more stagnant and perished than the dead themselves. Aunt Julia first appears like a withered flower: “her hair...was gray; and gray too, with darker shadows, was his great flabby face. ...[She had] the appearance of a woman who did not know where she was going” (187-188). Even this initial description seems to concern a near or past death. Even singing more beautifully than she ever did (202-203), she seems more prepared for her funeral than "Arrayed for the Bridal." She both wrote and, for every Christmas party she threw, performed this song about a wedding, and yet she never married or had children. Her life, although intermittently beautiful while it lasts, will soon end in obscurity, barren, childless, "wasted", as her... middle of paper...... lacks lasting meaning. What the lamented heroes of old possessed, and what today's zombie characters generally lack, is the knowledge that the formation and maintenance of emotional bonds between human beings is the only meaningful enterprise of humanity. human spirit and the only worthwhile enterprise of the human spirit. human life. Both authors make it clear that those who spend their lives going through the motions of an emotionless society waste it as slowly and painfully as their bodies. For them, the only way to truly live life is to follow the feeling, the passion of the soul. Works cited: Benstock, Bernard. Critical Essays on James Joyce. GK Hall & Co. Boston, Massachusetts: 1985. Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Washington Square Press, 1998. Woolf, Virginia. At the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1989.