A professor and part-time book reviewer named Gabriel Conroy attends a Christmas time party thrown by his aunts. As the party is breaking up, Gabriel witnesses his wife, Gretta, listening to a song sung by the renowned tenor Bartell D'Arcy, and the intensity of her focus on the music causes him to feel both sentimental and lustful. Later in the hotel room, Gabriel is devastated to discover that he has misunderstood Gretta's feelings; the sounds of the song reminds her of someone, a young man named Michael Furey, who had courted her in her youth and died because of her. Gabriel realizes that she has never been so passionate about their marriage. Conroy suddenly realizes that everything that previously was the subject of his pride is a fiction, that the deceased young man is more alive than he is, that “better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age”.