This Week’s Sentence 1

In an attempt to keep up with some web-based writing, I’ve decided to choose a particularly powerful sentence every week, occasionally attempting to explain its appeal.

This is the first, from James Joyce’s “The Dead” (Dubliners):
“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.”

The alliteration, repetition, and similar (in syntax and sound) phrasing contribute to the sentence’s poetic quality. The “their” lacks a clear antecedent in the sentence and in the story; in fact, I don’t believe it has an antecedent, but rather “their” refers to “the living and the dead.” This is the last sentence in the story, and it contains the entire story, as great sentences should.

The story is about the deadness in repetition. It’s hard to argue the deadness of this sentence, as it is alive with vibrant prose, but maybe the deadness can be argued by way of a suspect, perhaps inane, aspect in the sentence. I am not around snow often, but I’m sort of incredulous at the thought of this: “he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe.” I’ve never heard snow, nor (from what I understand about snow and cosmology) does snow fall through the universe; well it does, but in an unspecific way. Be it “falling faintly” or “faintly falling,” the sentence is only delaying the word “dead,” which doesn’t matter because it will come, eventually. And the “living” are included with the “dead,” and, indeed in the story, are “The Dead.”

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