At this point in “The Dead,” the last short story included in James Joyce's 1914 collection Dubliners, Gabriel Conroy is taking a moment by himself just before dinner is served at the holiday party hosted annually by Gabriel's two aunts, Kate and Julia Morkan, and by their niece, Mary Jane. Gabriel is trying to prepare himself for the speech he is to deliver after dinner. This moment is followed in turn by a life-changing revelation by his wife, Gretta, who tells Gabriel about how a young man named Michael Furey in effect chose her over life itself, standing out in a cold rain in ill-health for one last chance to see her. Below I provide a fuller synopsis of “The Dead” as a basis for exploring the crucial role that representations of consciousness play in the narrative as a whole; but let me dwell for a moment on the many manifestations of Gabriel's mind in just these few lines. Building on work by narrative scholars such as Alan Palmer and Ralf Schneider, my preliminary discussion suggests that analyzing fictional minds like Gabriel's entails giving an account of readers' minds, too - of how readers interpret particular textual details as information about characters' attempts to make sense of the world around them.