Dubliners

by James Joyce

The Sisters

An Outline Commentary

Bob Williams - © 1999

'There is no hope for him this time.' Nor any antecedent either. Uncle Jack (John in the original) tells us who it is at line 31, just as he tells us at line 41 that the narrator is a boy. We have already guessed that he is a student ('it was vacation time') and observed that, while his thoughts are reasonably direct, he has an unsophisticated awe of big words and wrestles paralysis into step with other favorite words: gnomon and simony. Together the three words form a trinity of references to the physical, intellectual and spiritual.

His aunt serves him porridge for dinner although his uncle offers their visitor, old Cotter, a snack of mutton. Cotter refuses (just as in 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room' Henchy refuses old Jack's chair and immediately takes it) but the aunt serves it. Cotter 'spits rudely into the grate' (as contrasted with the more genteel spitting into the grate of salesman and tea-taster Tom Kernan in 'Grace.') Is Cotter inventing himself as he goes along, uncertain of what he will say next? Whatever he will say, it will respond to the limits of his petty mind and small soul. It will be spiteful and hard and certain to annoy the boy. At first the boy had found him interesting and Cotter is revenging himself upon the boy and the memory of the man who supplanted him as a friend. Cotter clearly knows that there is something amiss with Father Flynn, that he was suspended by his bishop or that his paralysis is syphilitic in origin.

In bed, as the boy falls asleep, he fantasizes that the dead priest confesses to him. In his fantasy he perceives Father Flynn as a simoniac. The original of the word was Simon Magus, Simon the Magician and it is to the magical aspect that we are to look but it is a corrupt magic. Father Flynn's collapse arises from his inability to reconcile the reputed power of the priesthood with the mercantile base on which it rests. The fantasy does not seem to be a dream, as it is usually represented. The boy remembers his dream the following day and, although it has interest, it seems to have no direct connection with Father Flynn.

The mortuary notice on the shop door, which the boy reads with two old women and a telegram messenger, states that Father Flynn was formerly of S. Catherines's Church, Meath Street. It was at this church that Mary Ellen Callanan was organist. Mary Ellen Callanan was the original of Mary Jane in 'The Dead' although Mary Jane played the organ at S. Mary's on Haddington Road.

The boy thinks about Father Flynn. The priest was slovenly and a user of snuff but he told the boy stories, taught him the Latin responses for the mass and amused himself by propounding problems in morality to the boy.

The boy puzzles over Cotter's insinuations and, as if there were a connection, remembers a part of his dream. The dream had taken place in Persia. (Cf. the dreams of Stephen and Mr Bloom in Ulysses.) The dream with its implied theme of oriental splendor links this story to the same theme in 'Araby.'

The boy and his aunt pay a call of condolence on Father Flynn's sisters. Nannie, who is deaf, attends them wordlessly upstairs to view the body. She disturbs the boy by her mutterings as she prays. There is a heavy odor in the room. The boy is happy to believe it is the flowers.

The boy, his aunt and Nannie join Eliza, the other sister, downstairs in 'the little room.' Whatever this room, Joyce did not think it grand enough to be called a parlor and yet he describes Eliza as sitting in state. It contains a sideboard from which Nannie serves refreshments. No one speaks and they all stare at the empty fireplace. To Joyce there were no inanimate objects. In Ulysses both Bloom's button and Lynch's cap speak. In 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room' the fireplace is almost another character but this empty fireplace, of which we have not heard the last, offers us nothing. It may be a cousin of Fanny Price's cheerless room in Mansfield Park. (For the importance of kindling a fire, see Ulysses: 17.135 et seq.)

Of the refreshments the boy accepts a glass of wine but, afraid of making any noise on so solemn an occasion, rejects the cream crackers. Tindall makes the interesting suggestion that this is a maimed act of communion.

Eliza says that he died peacefully, that Father O'Rourke had given him the last rites and that the woman who helped lay him out remarked on his appearance of resignation. It was Father O'Rourke who made the funeral arrangements. But Eliza admits that Father Flynn had begun to act strangely although the sign of it that she gives seems harmless enough: he fell asleep over his breviary. Perhaps this indicates a failure of belief.

He had wanted to rent a carriage from the liveryman, Johnny Rush, and journey back to Irishtown 'where they had all been born.' Johnny Rush with his interest in horses relates to that other Johnny in 'The Dead.' That Johnny was a horse.

The reference to Irishtown emphasizes Father Flynn's very humble origins. Gifford describes the Irishtown of that time as a working-class slum.

Eliza weeps and studies the empty grate until she recovers.

Father Flynn broke a chalice and that was the beginning of his trouble. It contained nothing and it was the boy's fault. Since the only boy that we know is the narrator, we must see this as a reflection on him of a generic guilt even though we know that Eliza means some unknown acolyte by 'the boy.' Father Flynn was never the same after this. He was wanted to go on call but could not be found. The clerk suggested that he might be in the chapel.

She pauses in her story and the boy thinks of the dead priest upstairs with the idle chalice on his chest.

Father Flynn is in the confessional in the dark and is sort of laughing to himself. His discoverers know that there is something wrong.

The story is brief and the events are few. They come to us in carefully graduated amounts and from different perspectives. The boy grapples with the idea of death. It cannot be said that he acts. He is more of a witness to a variety of contexts, some of them his own. By itself it is a difficult story and some critics have claimed that its lack of conclusiveness is the point. To claim that pointlessness can be a point is a lame conclusion. In its context, a part of a whole book, the story presents fewer difficulties. The boy in this story has no opportunity to act. The boys of the next two stories act but without achievements, the first defeated by external circumstances and the second by inner flaws.

The story contains many dazzling devices on the technical level. The ubiquity of triads is especially notable. In an early scene the boy witnesses a conversation among the aunt, the uncle and Cotter. He pretends to ignore it but doesn't understand it and cannot be said to be a participant. The next morning there are two poor women and a telegram messenger at the shop door. A woman joins Nannie and Eliza to lay out the body and it is a clerk with two priests who finds Father Flynn in the confessional. In the closing scene the boy, as he was in the beginning, acts as witness to another trinity, the two sisters and his aunt.

The story has eight scenes. Three of these involve the boy alone and are so placed as to separate scenes occurring in the present. They also flow into those two scenes in which the boy thinks about Father Flynn in detail. There is a marvel of intricacy in the arrangement of the various parts and great ingenuity in the use of repetition and variation. These devices do not exist for themselves but as controls over the disclosure of Father Flynn's story. When Eliza speaks her last word about her brother, we witness the fulfillment of his sorry destiny on at least one level, a man destroyed by his inability to sustain impossible obligations. But Joyce gladly accepted multiple meanings and Gifford's suggestion that Father Flynn died of paresis adds another and uglier dimension.

Note: In many of Joyce's works (see more detailed comments in the outline of 'The Dead' and in the Appendix: The Vopiscan Complex) the relation of the living to the dead contains hints of the trauma and guilt that Joyce felt about being the oldest surviving son instead of the oldest son. In this connection the following reflection of the boy is relevant:

'I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death.'

'The Sisters': Characters (*mentioned)

• The boy
• Father James Flynn* (Flynn was a family name on Joyce's mother's side)
• Old Cotter – based on Edward G. Cotter, a work-mate of John Joyce
• The aunt
• Uncle Jack (John in the original)
• Two poor women
• A telegram messenger
• Nannie & Eliza – based on the Misses Monahan
• Father O'Rourke*
• A woman*
• Johnny Rush*
• The boy* (an acolyte)
• A clerk*
• A priest*