Dubliners was written by James Joyce when he was only 22 years old so it is rather unfair of the American academy to teach this early work over and over again as if it were all Joyce had to offer. Then, again, they treat it mechanically, seeking out odd bits of theology or making a theology out of it.

This is an innocent look at a young man's book. Written in 1904, it was not published until 10 years later when the First World War would come to alter every thinking man's idea of what our world, literary or otherwise, was like. It consists of 15 stories about Dublin and its inhabitants. The narrative voice of each story fits in with the age and perceptions of the main character in the story. These protagonists increase in age as the stories progress. So, the first story, "The Sisters", is told from the point of vision of a young boy, while the final story, "The Dead", virtually speaks for itself; you do not get older than dead. If Joyce had been completely successful in allowing the story-teller to speak for himself, with the writer like God above his creation "paring his fingernails", it would be indeed difficult for us to glean the author's own values and attitudes. We should only have the narrative voice by which to judge the normative. The writer would be invisible, as Joyce's avowed aesthetic aim was for him to be. He would be invisible, in hiding and aloof from his creation, a wholly transcendent deity. Some critics have seen Joyce in this way, taking him at his word, but we should always recall that Joyce himself held there were only two sempiternal loves: "The love of a woman for her son and the love of a man for lies". Perhaps, Joyce was lying. A close look at but the early stories in Dubliners will show how certain key phrases, certain oft-repeated or "strange" words, certain gestures assumed by characters do, in truth, give us a glimpse into the creator's own deeply-held values and into his judgments upon the Dublin of his times.

"The Sisters"—the title itself, that is—was chosen by the author for the first story in the collection though, at first perusal, these sisters are nothing like the most important characters in the story. The author elected the title. There must then be some moral or aesthetic reason on his part for doing so. The sisters are Nannie and Eliza. Their brother, Father James Flynn, the priest who died of "paralysis", is a focal point of the tale, as is the young narrator but: what are they there for? And, why is the story named after them?

Nannie seems the meeker of the two. She hardly says anything. Eliza it is who does all the talking and all the sherry-pouring, downstairs, where the visitors to the body of the dead Flynn are welcomed on the occasion of his laying-out. Nannie hardly speaks at all. What she does is "beckons" people into the room where the corpse is lying. "To beckon" is one of the few English words for which there is no equivalent in any other European language. Eliza, for her part—and like Old Cotter at the narrator's house—while she does indeed speak, has the habit of leaving sentences unfinished. Though a common enough trait in any conversational exchange, as in any speech act, it requires the listener or reader to complete the sense and fill in the unsaid. Apart from these particular and emphasized quirks, however, the story does not seem to be about the sisters at all. It is about "Father Flynn" or it is about the young boy himself. These sisters do not immediately attract our attention in any special way. Still, as noted, Joyce calls the tale "The Sisters". The reader is left to puzzle out why, just as he is left to complete both Eliza and Old Cotter's unfinished pronouncements. As we attempt to do that, we are also tempted to form some idea of the writer's true attitude towards the characters which he has created.

We have seen how Nannie "beckons" people into the deathbed presence. "Beckoning" is usually an alluring action, a temptation to something of hidden delight. We then notice that Eliza has a similarly curious, but lingual, approach to death. She employs the strange expression: "He (her brother) had a beautiful death" and adds that he made "a beautiful corpse". In short, what Nannie does through gesture, Eliza achieves via language: an apotheosis of death. It could be maintained that Eliza's is simply the type of thing people say when anyone dies. The whole dank and mildewy atmosphere of the story, however, is simply too sinister for such an interpretation. The reader has already seen "black cavernous nostrils" and been introduced to "the heavy grey face of the paralytic". Little "beauty" resides in such descriptions. It just might be that, for Eliza at least, the "beauty" of James Flynn's death is that it got rid of a potentially embarrassing brother who had gone a bit mad. Certainly this might be implied by Joyce since both Eliza and Cotter use the word "queer" when talking about Flynn. The beauty of his death may reside in the fact that respectability has been restored to the household as well as to the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Eliza has already spoken of something like this when her brother dropped the chalice, and notes with satisfaction "they say it was alright". The chalice, of course, theoretically should have contained the "blood of Christ"; fortunately, it was empty. Thus, the sinister sounding "they" are most likely the higher church authorities, the same "they" who had found James Flynn laughing to himself in the confession box.

If this is the case, then Eliza and Nannie, the one admiring her own brother's "beautiful death", the other "beckoning" visitors into the death chamber, might be easily seen as protectors and worshippers of death, a death equated with social respectability. That they also bow before church authority might then suggest that the writer, Joyce himself, considers the church in Dublin as anti-life, pro-death and more concerned with public probity than spiritual salvation. Certainly Eliza's paralepsis when she speaks of "rheumatic Wheels" rather than "pneumatic Wheels" points to her obsession with illness and disease, milestones on the road to death.

In this short story, then, oddly entitled "The Sisters", through Nannie's gesture of beckoning, through Eliza's connecting "beauty" with "death", Joyce seems to be saying that Dublin old folk are in love with death and in the death-like grip of a decaying church authority. Death itself becomes linked to respectability and the Church forgives Flynn, saying that there was "nothing" in the chalice which he dropped. In it, there should have been the spirit of true religion but, in Joyce's Dublin, this spirit has fled.

Cotter's "unfinished sentences" often suggest some sexual perversion on the part of Father Flynn as does his talk of not liking young boys hanging around "old Flynn". Whether this is in fact true or not, the reader cannot know. What she does know is that the snuff-taking priest used to leer obscenely with his bottom lip dangling—another gestural indicator there—and, more important, that the child narrator had been afraid to enter Flynn's house alone, and had walked away "along the sunny side of the street". There, he had felt "a sensation of freedom". The young of Dublin are not yet as in love with death as their elders and may offer some kind of promise for the morrow. All this we can guess at by puzzling over the meaning of unfinished sentences and closely observing gestures. The young boy walks from the house of death and decay, the sisters welcome death. The story is called "The Sisters". They hardly appear in their story. It is then not too far-fetched to suppose that they are symbols of some kind. What they apparently symbolize is something about Dublin and its representative inhabitants as viewed by Joyce himself. And, what stands out is: obedience to authority, disease, death, sexual perversity, decay and a stifling respectability.

If we are right about Joyce's own true attitude toward Dublin and its inhabitants—that he is in favour of youth over age, life over death, freedom over authority—then this set of values should be lurking somewhere in all the stories, despite his own claims to aesthetic impartiality. "The Sisters", being the first story, is very likely to be the story that sets the stage for all the themes Joyce was most interested in. So careful a craftsman would make the first tale a synopsis and an introduction to all that follows.

We began by mentioning "strange words", and this indeed is what many critics, especially American critics, have focused on. The strangest are probably those which the little boy in "The Sisters" himself had found strange. They are "paralysis", "gnomon" and "simony". We have already looked at paralysis in the company of Father Flynn. A "gnomon" is the triangular piece on a sundial, the piece which throws a shadow and indicates the time and its passing. Shadows were ubiquitous in "The Sisters" and it is from the shadow of Flynn's house that the lad crosses to the sunny side of the street. "Simony" is a religious word meaning "the selling of sacred things". The sisters have, in a way, sold their brother for respectability; the church, its soul for secular authority. To see if these words really do continue to cast their shadow over Dubliners, we may now turn to "An Encounter", the second of the stories in the book.

Conclusion—»