Michael Furey is a martyr who died for Gretta’s sake. When Gretta hears the song, The Lass of Aughrim , she begins to cry, thinking of how Michael used to sing. Because he has the ability to affect others even after his death, he is more alive than the other characters who still have life. The monks attempt to imitate death through their lives of ritual by sleeping in coffins. The monks want to exit their carnal existence by refusing to talk. Not only have they freed themselves from speech and society, but they have achieved this through self-negation—or living like they are dead. Some of the characters at the dinner party do not understand their behavior: “Freddy Malins explained to him, as best he could, that the monks were trying to make up for the sins committed by all the sinners in the outside world” (Joyce 16). Unlike the monks, the other characters do not see the purpose to their norms, but spend their time discussing other’s rituals.
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice begins with the proposition "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." In fact, it soon becomes clear that Austen means the opposite: women (or their mothers) are always in search of, and desperately on the lookout for, a rich single man to make a husband. The irony deepens as the story promotes this romance and ends in a double marriage proposal. "Austen's comic irony emerges out of the disjunction between Elizabeth's overconfidence (or pride) in her perceptions of Darcy and the narrator's indications that her views are in fact partial and prejudicial."