I love 'The Dead', and did a long in-depth essay about it for English language module undergraduate, relating to what linguists (and probably non linguists tbf) call 'dead metaphors'. I loved it the first time around because it reminded me, sentimentally, of family gatherings past, and then of course the extraordinary transition into transcendence of the last few pages—but studying it in depth revealed ingenuity that had passed me by, or seeped in unconsciously, when I was reading it the first time.
I remember one of the first sentences in the story is "XXX was literally run off her feet" and some critic or commentator alerted me to this not being the 'objective' omniscient narrator speaking but the maid.
I think Edmund Wilson talks about how Joyce was shaping language to character and incident even in these more 'straightforward' stories and that reaches its ultimate expression in 'ulysses' with the stream of consciousness of course and even the seemingly unfitting parodic styles in e.g. 'oxen' that are shaped to the incidents in the maternity hospital (e.g. bloom's de quincean vision as he stares at the beer bottle)