THERE was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: "I am not long for this world," and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

Old Cotter was sitting at the fire, smoking, when I came downstairs to supper. While my aunt was ladling out my stirabout he said, as if returning to some former remark of his:

"No, I wouldn't say he was exactly... but there was something queer... there was something uncanny about him. I'll tell you my opinion...."

He began to puff at his pipe, no doubt arranging his opinion in his mind. Tiresome old fool! When we knew him first he used to be rather interesting, talking of faints and worms; but I soon grew tired of him and his endless stories about the distillery.

"I have my own theory about it," he said. "I think it was one of those ... peculiar cases .... But it's hard to say...."

He began to puff again at his pipe without giving us his theory. My uncle saw me staring and said to me:

"Well, so your old friend is gone, you'll be sorry to hear."

"Who?" said I.

"Father Flynn."

"Is he dead?"

"Mr. Cotter here has just told us. He was passing by the house."

I knew that I was under observation so I continued eating as if the news had not interested me. My uncle explained to old Cotter.

"The youngster and he were great friends. The old chap taught him a great deal, mind you; and they say he had a great wish for him."

"God have mercy on his soul," said my aunt piously.

Old Cotter looked at me for a while. I felt that his little beady black eyes were examining me but I would not satisfy him by looking up from my plate. He returned to his pipe and finally spat rudely into the grate.

"I wouldn't like children of mine," he said, "to have too much to say to a man like that."

"How do you mean, Mr. Cotter?" asked my aunt.

"What I mean is," said old Cotter, "it's bad for children. My idea is: let a young lad run about and play with young lads of his own age and not be... Am I right, Jack?"

"That's my principle, too," said my uncle. "Let him learn to box his corner. That's what I'm always saying to that Rosicrucian there: take exercise. Why, when I was a nipper every morning of my life I had a cold bath, winter and summer. And that's what stands to me now. Education is all very fine and large.... Mr. Cotter might take a pick of that leg mutton," he added to my aunt.

"No, no, not for me," said old Cotter.

My aunt brought the dish from the safe and put it on the table.

"But why do you think it's not good for children, Mr. Cotter?" she asked.

"It's bad for children," said old Cotter, "because their mind are so impressionable. When children see things like that, you know, it has an effect...."

I crammed my mouth with stirabout for fear I might give utterance to my anger. Tiresome old red-nosed imbecile!

It was late when I fell asleep. Though I was angry with old Cotter for alluding to me as a child, I puzzled my head to extract meaning from his unfinished sentences. In the dark of my room I imagined that I saw again the heavy grey face of the paralytic. I drew the blankets over my head and tried to think of Christmas. But the grey face still followed me. It murmured, and I understood that it desired to confess something. I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region; and there again I found it waiting for me. It began to confess to me in a murmuring voice and I wondered why it smiled continually and why the lips were so moist with spittle. But then I remembered that it had died of paralysis and I felt that I too was smiling feebly as if to absolve the simoniac of his sin.

The next morning after breakfast I went down to look at the little house in Great Britain Street. It was an unassuming shop, registered under the vague name of Drapery . The drapery consisted mainly of children's bootees and umbrellas; and on ordinary days a notice used to hang in the window, saying: Umbrellas Re-covered . No notice was visible now for the shutters were up. A crape bouquet was tied to the doorknocker with ribbon. Two poor women and a telegram boy were reading the card pinned on the crape. I also approached and read:

July 1st, 1895

The Rev. James Flynn (formerly of S. Catherine's Church,

Meath Street), aged sixty-five years.

R. I. P.

The reading of the card persuaded me that he was dead and I was disturbed to find myself at check. Had he not been dead I would have gone into the little dark room behind the shop to find him sitting in his arm-chair by the fire, nearly smothered in his great-coat. Perhaps my aunt would have given me a packet of High Toast for him and this present would have roused him from his stupefied doze. It was always I who emptied the packet into his black snuff-box for his hands trembled too much to allow him to do this without spilling half the snuff about the floor. Even as he raised his large trembling hand to his nose little clouds of smoke dribbled through his fingers over the front of his coat. It may have been these constant showers of snuff which gave his ancient priestly garments their green faded look for the red handkerchief, blackened, as it always was, with the snuff-stains of a week, with which he tried to brush away the fallen grains, was quite inefficacious.

I wished to go in and look at him but I had not the courage to knock. I walked away slowly along the sunny side of the street, reading all the theatrical advertisements in the shop-windows as I went. I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death. I wondered at this for, as my uncle had said the night before, he had taught me a great deal. He had studied in the Irish college in Rome and he had taught me to pronounce Latin properly. He had told me stories about the catacombs and about Napoleon Bonaparte, and he had explained to me the meaning of the different ceremonies of the Mass and of the different vestments worn by the priest. Sometimes he had amused himself by putting difficult questions to me, asking me what one should do in certain circumstances or whether such and such sins were mortal or venial or only imperfections. His questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the Church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts. The duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them; and I was not surprised when he told me that the fathers of the Church had written books as thick as the Post Office Directory and as closely printed as the law notices in the newspaper, elucidating all these intricate questions. Often when I thought of this I could make no answer or only a very foolish and halting one upon which he used to smile and nod his head twice or thrice. Sometimes he used to put me through the responses of the Mass which he had made me learn by heart; and, as I pattered, he used to smile pensively and nod his head, now and then pushing huge pinches of snuff up each nostril alternately. When he smiled he used to uncover his big discoloured teeth and let his tongue lie upon his lower lip -- a habit which had made me feel uneasy in the beginning of our acquaintance before I knew him well.

As I walked along in the sun I remembered old Cotter's words and tried to remember what had happened afterwards in the dream. I remembered that I had noticed long velvet curtains and a swinging lamp of antique fashion. I felt that I had been very far away, in some land where the customs were strange -- in Persia, I thought.... But I could not remember the end of the dream.

In the evening my aunt took me with her to visit the house of mourning. It was after sunset; but the window-panes of the houses that looked to the west reflected the tawny gold of a great bank of clouds. Nannie received us in the hall; and, as it would have been unseemly to have shouted at her, my aunt shook hands with her for all. The old woman pointed upwards interrogatively and, on my aunt's nodding, proceeded to toil up the narrow staircase before us, her bowed head being scarcely above the level of the banister-rail. At the first landing she stopped and beckoned us forward encouragingly towards the open door of the dead-room. My aunt went in and the old woman, seeing that I hesitated to enter, began to beckon to me again repeatedly with her hand.

I went in on tiptoe. The room through the lace end of the blind was suffused with dusky golden light amid which the candles looked like pale thin flames. He had been coffined. Nannie gave the lead and we three knelt down at the foot of the bed. I pretended to pray but I could not gather my thoughts because the old woman's mutterings distracted me. I noticed how clumsily her skirt was hooked at the back and how the heels of her cloth boots were trodden down all to one side. The fancy came to me that the old priest was smiling as he lay there in his coffin.

But no. When we rose and went up to the head of the bed I saw that he was not smiling. There he lay, solemn and copious, vested as for the altar, his large hands loosely retaining a chalice. His face was very truculent, grey and massive, with black cavernous nostrils and circled by a scanty white fur. There was a heavy odour in the room -- the flowers.

We crossed ourselves and came away. In the little room downstairs we found Eliza seated in his arm-chair in state. I groped my way towards my usual chair in the corner while Nannie went to the sideboard and brought out a decanter of sherry and some wine-glasses. She set these on the table and invited us to take a little glass of wine. Then, at her sister's bidding, she filled out the sherry into the glasses and passed them to us. She pressed me to take some cream crackers also but I declined because I thought I would make too much noise eating them. She seemed to be somewhat disappointed at my refusal and went over quietly to the sofa where she sat down behind her sister. No one spoke: we all gazed at the empty fireplace.

My aunt waited until Eliza sighed and then said:

"Ah, well, he's gone to a better world."

Eliza sighed again and bowed her head in assent. My aunt fingered the stem of her wine-glass before sipping a little.

"Did he... peacefully?" she asked.

"Oh, quite peacefully, ma'am," said Eliza. "You couldn't tell when the breath went out of him. He had a beautiful death, God be praised."

"And everything...?"

"Father O'Rourke was in with him a Tuesday and anointed him and prepared him and all."

"He knew then?"

"He was quite resigned."

"He looks quite resigned," said my aunt.

"That's what the woman we had in to wash him said. She said he just looked as if he was asleep, he looked that peaceful and resigned. No one would think he'd make such a beautiful corpse."

"Yes, indeed," said my aunt.

She sipped a little more from her glass and said:

"Well, Miss Flynn, at any rate it must be a great comfort for you to know that you did all you could for him. You were both very kind to him, I must say."

Eliza smoothed her dress over her knees.

"Ah, poor James!" she said. "God knows we done all we could, as poor as we are -- we wouldn't see him want anything while he was in it."

Nannie had leaned her head against the sofa-pillow and seemed about to fall asleep.

"There's poor Nannie," said Eliza, looking at her, "she's wore out. All the work we had, she and me, getting in the woman to wash him and then laying him out and then the coffin and then arranging about the Mass in the chapel. Only for Father O'Rourke I don't know what we'd done at all. It was him brought us all them flowers and them two candlesticks out of the chapel and wrote out the notice for the Freeman's General and took charge of all the papers for the cemetery and poor James's insurance."

"Wasn't that good of him?" said my aunt

Eliza closed her eyes and shook her head slowly.

"Ah, there's no friends like the old friends," she said, "when all is said and done, no friends that a body can trust."

"Indeed, that's true," said my aunt. "And I'm sure now that he's gone to his eternal reward he won't forget you and all your kindness to him."

"Ah, poor James!" said Eliza. "He was no great trouble to us. You wouldn't hear him in the house any more than now. Still, I know he's gone and all to that...."

"It's when it's all over that you'll miss him," said my aunt.

"I know that," said Eliza. "I won't be bringing him in his cup of beef-tea any me, nor you, ma'am, sending him his snuff. Ah, poor James!"

She stopped, as if she were communing with the past and then said shrewdly:

"Mind you, I noticed there was something queer coming over him latterly. Whenever I'd bring in his soup to him there I'd find him with his breviary fallen to the floor, lying back in the chair and his mouth open."

She laid a finger against her nose and frowned: then she continued:

"But still and all he kept on saying that before the summer was over he'd go out for a drive one fine day just to see the old house again where we were all born down in Irishtown and take me and Nannie with him. If we could only get one of them new-fangled carriages that makes no noise that Father O'Rourke told him about, them with the rheumatic wheels, for the day cheap -- he said, at Johnny Rush's over the way there and drive out the three of us together of a Sunday evening. He had his mind set on that.... Poor James!"

"The Lord have mercy on his soul!" said my aunt.

Eliza took out her handkerchief and wiped her eyes with it. Then she put it back again in her pocket and gazed into the empty grate for some time without speaking.

"He was too scrupulous always," she said. "The duties of the priesthood was too much for him. And then his life was, you night say, crossed."

"Yes," said my aunt. "He was a disappointed man. You could see that."

A silence took possession of the little room and, under cover of it, I approached the table and tasted my sherry and then returned quietly to my chair in the comer. Eliza seemed to have fallen into a deep revery. We waited respectfully for her to break the silence: and after a long pause she said slowly:

"It was that chalice he broke.... That was the beginning of it. Of course, they say it was all right, that it contained nothing, I mean. But still.... They say it was the boy's fault. But poor James was so nervous, God be merciful to him!"

"And was that it?" said my aunt. "I heard something...."

Eliza nodded.

"That affected his mind," she said. "After that he began to mope by himself, talking to no one and wandering about by himself. So one night he was wanted for to go on a call and they couldn't find him anywhere. They looked high up and low down; and still they couldn't see a sight of him anywhere. So then the clerk suggested to try the chapel. So then they got the keys and opened the chapel and the clerk and Father O'Rourke and another priest that was there brought in a light for to look for him.... And what do you think but there he was, sitting up by himself in the dark in his confession-box, wide- awake and laughing-like softly to himself?"

She stopped suddenly as if to listen. I too listened; but there was no sound in the house: and I knew that the old priest was lying still in his coffin as we had seen him, solemn and truculent in death, an idle chalice on his breast.

Eliza resumed:

"Wide-awake and laughing-like to himself.... So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him...."

The Sisters is a short story by James Joyce, the first of a series of short stories called Dubliners. The Irish Homestead Journal originally published The Sisters on August 13, 1904. It was Joyce's first published work of fiction. Joyce later revised the story and had it, along with the rest of the series, published in book form in 1914.

Major characters

• The boy (narrator)

• James Flynn, former priest

• Eliza Flynn, sister of James Flynn

• Nannie Flynn, sister of James Flynn

• Old Cotter

• Aunt of the boy

• Uncle of the boy

Plot summary

The Sisters gives a portrait of the relationship between a nameless boy and the infirmed priest Father Flynn. The priest who has been relieved of his priestly duties has acted as a mentor for the boy in the clerical duties of a Catholic priest.

The story starts with the boy contemplating Father Flynn's illness and impending death. He is fascinated with interpreting signs and symbols, and their meaning.

Later, while the boy eats his dinner, his aunt, uncle, and old Cotter have a conversation in which the boy is informed that the priest has died. The conversation focuses on the priest and his relationship with the boy.

That night the boy is haunted by images of the priest, and he dreams of escape to a mysterious land.

The next day the boy goes to look at the announcement that the priest has died, and then wanders about, further puzzling about his dream and about his relationship with the priest.

That night the boy and his aunt go to the house of mourning. They view the corpse with Nannie, and then they sit with the sisters Eliza and Nannie. They are offered food and drink, and then Eliza and the aunt carry on a conversation that reveals that Father Flynn had apparently suffered a mental breakdown after accidentally breaking a chalice. The dialogue then trails off.

The Sisters by James Joyce

In my opinion , the story is an illusive story and has a deeper meaning that hides behind the words and symbols that Joyce uses.

The boy ,whose dear friend is in fact a 65 years old preist named father Flynn, sensed in a way that something was inappropriate, that there was something wrong with their relationship. He`s feelings about the preist are ambivalent. He feels close to the preist due to the fact that they spent time together and father flynn taught him a lot of things. On the other hand, he feels some sort of a relief when the preist dies of paralysis.

He says that the preist made him feel uncomfortable with he`s tongue lying on the lower lip (insinuates something sexual).

He has already distanced himself from the preist by referring to the body as “it”, and sees the dead preist in his dream trying to confess about something with a smile and moist lips with spittle (again , sexual).

When I think about it I understand that maybe the paralysis of the preist represents the paralysis of the catholic church in ireland.

Another thing is the problomatic title of the story. The tittle does not really fit the story. The sisters do play a part in the story but it`s a rather minor part, since we tend to see the boy and the preist as the main charactors.

Maybe by putting the sisters as the title of the story Joyce wanted to show the good, mercyful side in addition to the sinful side that father Flynn represents.

Analysis:

"The Sisters," the first of the stories in Dubliners, is also one of the more accomplished tales. Subtle, haunting, and beautifully controlled, "The Sisters" is also elusive, withholding from us the extent of the understanding possessed by the nameless boy narrator.

Many read Dubliners as being chronologically arranged according to the ages of a life. We start with the impressionable young narrator of "The Sisters." The boy, who remains unnamed, is intelligent and emotionally honest. But he may not see, as the reader does, many of the implications of the story he tells. Perhaps innocently, he reports the clues and puzzles that surround Father Flynn's death. Part of the difficulty of Dubliners is the amount of information Joyce withholds. Although the story is narrated in the first person, we cannot be sure what the child protagonist makes of the story he tells us. The boy tends to narrate in a straightforward manner, honestly sharing with us his distaste for old Cotter (whom he calls a "tiresome old red-nosed imbecile"); this particular passage seems to indicate that the narrator is still a child, as opposed to a wiser adult looking back with the added perspective of many years' experience. The boy seems to volunteer his emotions to the reader willingly enough, as when he shares his intimate memories of his time with Father Flynn. But towards the end of the story, he stops interpreting the information he receives. He listens to the conversation between his mother and the two sisters, but he does not draw any conclusions from it. In a sense, he withdraws from the story. More on that later.

It would be difficult to overstate the incredible influence of the Catholic Church over the life of the average Irishman in this time period. The Church looms over many of the stories in Dubliners, and over all of Joyce's work. He was deeply anti-Catholic, and at times his critiques of Catholicism are almost sneering in tone. "The Sisters" is one of his more controlled tales. The reader leaves the tale troubled. Father Flynn is at base a sympathetic character; at the same time, piety becomes problematic and the spiritually reassuring aspects of faith are undermined. Even the touching friendship between boy and priest is called into question. Old Cotter feels that no child should be spending so much time with a priest; such a friendship might unduly influence an impressionable youth, when he should be playing with boys his own age. The narrator disagrees, but then again, any dissent on his part would only be used by old Cotter to buttress his own argument.

Joyce was clearly fascinated by the awesome spiritual power invested by the Catholic Church in its priests. Priests are the bearers of incredible spiritual responsibility. The Church holds that through the priest as an intermediary, sin itself is atoned for. They are caretakers of men's souls, and masters of the many obscure and esoteric details of Catholic theology. But the mental decline of this priest has made him appear completely human and vulnerable. His mind, once the repository of knowledge about countless points of doctrine and ritual, has fallen into ruins.

Some scholars have identified the priest's mental illness as the final stages of syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease. If so, the sins of the priest's past would also seem to strip him of any special or holy status. Remember that the mad priest is found in the confessional, where Catholics go to confess their sins; the location suggests that the mental illness could indeed be the final product of a past sexual transgression. The narrator's mother asks if he received Extreme Unction, a final sacrament. For her to even ask the question suggests some kind of wrongdoing on Father Flynn's part; under only the most extreme of circumstances would the Church deny the sacrament to a priest.

Both the priest's madness and his hinted-at past sin reveal a world apart from his life as the official of his Church. His official functions as caretaker of the Church, and his unofficial function as the narrator's avuncular spiritual guide, were once the only sides of Father Flynn that the narrator saw. But his madness and possible dark past are now revealed to the narrator, all while the narrator is having what is presumably his first intimate experience with death.

The mad priest also has clear symbolic resonance, suggesting that the Church itself has become a senile and raving institution, with a dark past that has yet to be answered for. The degeneration of the priest's mind seems a metaphor for the deterioration of Catholic theology and doctrine. What once seemed a rational and coherent system has turned into gibberish in the priest's mind; metaphorically, Catholic philosophy has changed from a respectable approach to the pursuit of knowledge into an irrelevant and esoteric system of thought referring only to itself. The degeneration is seen in other aspects of Catholic life: Catholics of this period were perceived as being ridiculously superstitious, and in this story all the supposedly rational doctrines of the Church are thrust aside by Father Flynn's sister in favor of good-old fashioned fearful superstition. Rather than seek a rational explanation for her brother's madness, she resorts to superstition: his madness began, she claims, when he accidentally broke a holy chalice used during Mass. The sisters are simple, good, poor, and humble, but their explanation for their brother's illness is self-deluding and irrational. In them and the impressionable young narrator, Joyce depicts an Ireland in the yoke of a tyranny that is mental rather than political. Paralysis is a recurring theme in the stories. The priest spends his last days paralyzed, and this sickness can be read a metaphor for the backwardness and reactionary politics of the Catholic Church.

The narrator is oblique and difficult, beginning the story with a degree of openness but withdrawing gradually from the story. We are permitted to see something of his growth: for example, he fails to grieve deeply for his friend, and he is sensitive enough to know that he should. He is annoyed by this shortcoming, and in this annoyance we see a boy measuring himself against what he knows is expected of him in this new experience. His dreams also show how the experience has shaken him: he sees his priest friend moving his lips, as if to confess something. This strange dream suggests that at least some part of the boy suspects his friend's past.

But towards the end of the story, we see less of the character's interpretive thoughts about his situation. It is as if the boy cannot quite put his finger on what has happened, in part because he's too busy trying to relate the bare facts. By the story's end, the narrative has the detachment of a story written in third-person. This removal of subjective opinions and feelings has the effect of pushing the priest and his story front-and-center in the reader's attention. The increasing detachment also suggests a boy still trying to make sense of what he has seen; the reader is invited to make sense of things, as the boy does, alone. The final frightening images of the mad priest are given directly from his sister's mouth, with no intrusive narrator to filter these events.

مجموعه داستان «دوبليني ها» شامل پانزده داستان كوتاه است كه در سال 1914 به سبك ناتوراليسم نوشته شد. داستان ها همه در مورد زندگي اهالي دوبلين است . مردمي كه دچار تعصب هستند، تبديل به آدم هايي منزوي ، سرخورده و اغلب دغل باز شده اند.
اگرچه زبان جويس در «دوبليني ها» هنوز به پيچيدگي كلامش در «اوليس » و آثار بعدي اش نشده ، اما براي نزديك تر شدن به فضاي داستان بد نيست يك لغتنامه ، يك دايره المعارف و يك مجموعه كامل از نشانه شناسي اساطيري كنار دستمان داشته باشيم ! دوبليني ها را بايد چندين بار خواند. يك بار بدون توجه به پي نويس ها و پا نوشت ها، تا تنها از فضايي كه نويسنده با هنرمندي از زندگي روزمره آدم هايي عادي در مكان هاي معمولي نشان داده ، لذت برد و همچنين فلسفه عميق و طنز دردآوري را كه در لايه هاي زيرين داستان وجود دارد مزه مزه كرد و دفعات ديگر با توجه به تمام اشارات و كنايات و مضامين اساطيري كه لابه لاي كلماتش پيچيده و با قدرت مكاشفه و درك اين همه ، خواند. گويي جويس انتظار داشته خوانندگانش مابقي عمرشان ، فقط آثار او را بخوانند!
«خواهران » اولين داستان اين مجموعه است . داستان پسري كه با شنيدن خبر مرگ كشيشي كه ارتباطي عميق اما دست و پاگير با او داشته ، آغاز مي شود. داستاني پرديالوگ ، مانند اغلب داستان هاي جويس . ديالوگ در اين اثر نقشي كليدي دارد. در واقع ما حالات دروني پسرك را از لابه لاي گفت وگوي ديگران درك مي كنيم . اگرچه جويس مراقب است بسيار بي طرفانه بنويسد و كمتر لحني جانبدارانه به خود مي گيرد، اما با هوشياري و توجه به جزييات كلامي ، مثل تكيه كلام ها يا حتي تلفظ غلط بعضي از عبارات يا توضيح حركاتي مثل نشستن ، نگاه كردن يا حركات سر و دست ... چنان شخصيتي ملموس به خواننده ارايه مي دهد كه جاي هيچ ابهامي نمي گذارد.
بطور مثال نمونه يي از استفاده از قدرت بالفعل كلمات را مي شود در همين داستان ديد، نويسنده با آوردن واژه «شمعوني » و توضيحاتي كه خواهران در مورد نوع مرگ كشيش مي دهند، خواننده را به اين درك مي رساند كه پيرمرد كشيش در واقع آدمي بوده كه از راه دين تجارت مي كرده . ( پي نويس خواهران صالح حسيني ) و اينچنين پيرمرد نمادي مي شود از جنبه هاي فاسد مسيحيت .
با كمي توجه مي شود دريافت كه در سه داستان آغاز اين مجموعه يعني «خواهران »، «برخورد» و «عربي »، شخصيت اصلي نوجوان بوده . نوجواني كه از آلوده شدن به آفت هاي محيط اطراف خود در هراسي دايم بسر مي برد. اما رفته رفته كه پيش تر مي رويم ، گويي شخصيت داستان هم رشد مي كند و اصولا انگار در تمام اين مجموعه يك شخصيت است كه خواننده شاهد درك قدم به قدم او از دنياي اطرافش است .
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