What is significant or symbolic about the title " The Dead"? Dubliners by James Joyce

The last story in James Joyce's Dubliners, "The Dead"
combines all the categories of the other stories; that is, it combines childhood,
adolescence, mature life, public life, and married life, unifying them in their
spiritual paralysis.  In this story it is the defeated, colonial city that is dead;
there is yet hope that the Irish people may have the spiritual resources to break this
paralysis and counter the malaise in which they live.

The
main character of the story, Gabriel Conroy, tries to escape squalid reality in reverie
as he perceives his wife romantically as she stands at the top of the stairs, and then
again he finds her attractive in the cab and while he watches the snow.  When they reach
the hotel room, however, his wife confesses that she has been in love with a man who
died for her sake, and the lines between the living and the dead begin to blur, just as
the lines between reverie and reality have:

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...the solid world itself which these dead had
one time reared and lived in was dissolving and
dwindling.

While Gabriel
looks westward and watches the snow falling,

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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.

Gabriel has had
an incomplete recognition, but he has gained some admiration for his wife, Greta.  And,
he offers some hope for the Dubliners who in this last story are united, living and
dead:

Better
pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and
wither dismally with
age. 

The title, "The Dead,"
symbolizes the inner death, the spiritual paralysis of those who escape their squalid
reality in reveries, but they are yet limited in their imaginings.  At the party Molly
Ivors calls Gabriel a "West Briton," accusing him of lack of loyalty, and he later
learns that he does not really know his wife.  In short, Gabriel realizes later that he
has been living his life as though he were dead.  However, he feels that it is better
now to live life "in the full glory of some passion...."  So, with death, there is a
resurrection of spirit in its recognition of the human condition.  And, this is the
significance of the title of "The Dead": there can be a resurrection of spirit for the
Irish although their capital city is as a colonial city is
effete.