Garden Party
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'If we contrast her comments to her brother - "'Isn't life " (346) - with her behaviour earlier in the day (she wants to call off the party when she hears of the workman's death but happily bows to her mother's insistence and seems to forget all about it when her brother tells her that she has "'an absolutely topping hat'" 344) - what we find, as we did with Gabriel in The Dead, is the possibility that her epiphany is something false, something done for effect.
He's not dead - he's just asleep
Of course, we could allow her the benefit of doubt and assume that her desperate attempts to romanticise the dead worker as some kind of sleeping hero (346), especially given her earlier albeit innocent flirting with the working men who have come to put up the tent - how wonderful they are with such clear eyes, and so on - represent a young girl's first and poignant attempts to come to terms with death:
There lay a young man, fast asleep - sleeping so soundly, so deeply, that he was far, far away from them both. Oh, so remote, so peaceful. He was dreaming. Never wake him up again. (346)
She is, after all, at an age when teenagers take everything absolutely seriously, and she does say when she arrives at the worker's cottage: "'Forgive my hat'" (346) - that is, she recognises how out of place she is in this situation.
You can get a feeling for the free indirect thought here - the narrator actually seems to be Laura and we certainly do not get any more information than she has as she ponders the dead man:
What did garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful. While they were laughing and while the band was playing, this marvel had come to the lane...