I thought the Pecora reading brought new insight into our discussion because it addressed not only the authenticity or inauthenticity of the text itself, but the difficulty of close reading when interpretation is so subjective and dependent on one’s personal world. I read “The Dead” with pretty much no idea that Joyce might be using irony–caricaturing Michael Furey, needling Gretta’s romanticized obsession with him, making Gabriel a kind of punchline–and since I found the interpretation very dark and unsettling, I thought Pecora’s turn inward to his own life to rationalize the way he came to that particular interpretation a really interesting way to approach literary theory.

The acknowledgement of subjectivity in interpretation seemed to contribute to Pecora’s takeaway at the end, where he proposes Joyce “remained confused and uncertain and wrote an awfully good story about his perplexity” (359). Pecora admits bias and human error in his conclusions about the story, which in turn makes it logical for him to identify the same confusion in the story and Joyce himself. By framing his argument in terms of the author’s “deep and irresolvable ambivalence”, Pecora opens up a dimension of analysis conducive to interpretations that exist more as gray areas than bottom-line statements (“It’s ironic. It’s sincere”).