Hollywood Dubliners become personal: Joyce’s Gabriel morphs to John Huston in The Dead

Abstract

Literary adaptation has been both intriguing and challenging for directors especially when it comes to complicated modernist writers like James Joyce (1882–1941) who is commonly considered unadaptable. First approached by John Huston (1906–1987), Joyce’s famous short story, “The Dead” (1914) came to Hollywood (1987). Unitizing the views of different scholars in the realm of adaptation studies, this paper reveals why the director has changed the emotional features of the main hero, Gabriel, in his last movie. The main gap in adaptation studies is mostly associated with analyzing the works in relation to their main sources rather than scrutinizing them individually. We try to fill this gap by focusing on the film and Huston’s personal life. It is concluded that Huston, the product of a troubled childhood and marital life, recreated Gabriel to portray his personal dilemmas.