This study, as an interdisciplinary approach, examines how James Joyce’s “The Dead” foregrounds issues of memory, trauma, and mourning in the context of Ireland. Those concepts this study draws on in understanding memory and trauma are voluntary memory and autobiographical memory as well as nachträglichkeit.

This study also draws, in order to understand traumatic emotion, on the concept of past-directed emotion. Mourning might be inexpressible, if we accept a psychoanalyst’s saying that ‘inexpressible’ mourning builds a secret tomb inside the patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. But this study examines how mourning can be effectively expressible in Joyce’s work, chasing not only his effective style including free indirect discourse, but also a chief female character’s emotion.

This study ends with a comment that in Joyce’s work, expressible mourning requires a sphere of social life, where the unrequited past is opened up, leading a life to the future.