Short Stories. James Joyce - Dubliners. Comparison between "The Sisters" and "Araby".

Khalid Attia English Language and Literature Mr. Parsons

Short Stories

James Joyce – Dubliners

Comparison between “The Sisters” and “Araby”

"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. 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, ...

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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.

Araby however, is slightly different to “The Sisters” style of narration. As with "The Encounter," this story deals with longing for adventure and escape, though here this longing finds a focus in the object of the narrator's desire. The title Araby also suggests escape. To the nineteenth-century European mind, the Islamic lands of North Africa, the Near East, and the Middle East symbolized decadence, exotic delights, escapism, and a luxurious sensuality. The boy's erotic desires for the girl become joined to his fantasies about the wonders that will be offered in the Orientalist bazaar; he dreams of buying her a suitably romantic gift. The third story of the collection, it is the last story with a first-person narrator. It continues with the ages-of-life structure: we have had young boys for our protagonists in both "The Sisters" and "An Encounter," and here we have a boy in the throes of his first passion. As the boy is becoming a man, the bazaar becomes emblematic for the difficulty of the adult world, in which the boy proves unable to navigate. Boyish fantasies are dashed by the realities of life in Dublin. The first three stories are all narrated in the first-person, and they all have nameless boys as their narrators. All three narrators seem sensitive and intelligent, with keen interests in learning and a propensity for fantasy. Joyce, still in his early twenties when he wrote Dubliners, clearly drew on his own personal experiences more directly in writing these three tales. The namelessness of all three boys also encourages interpreters to identify them with Joyce, although from an interpretive point of view this move does little to illuminate the stories.

Araby's key theme is frustration, as the boy deals with the limits imposed on him by his situation. The protagonist has a series of romantic ideas, about the girl and the wondrous event that he will attend on her behalf. But on the night when he awaits his uncle's return so that he can go to the bazaar, we feel the boy's frustration mounting. For a time, the boy fears he may not be able to go at all. When he finally does arrive, the bazaar is more or less over. His fantasies about the bazaar and buying a great gift for the girl are revealed as ridiculous. For one thing, the bazaar is a rather tawdry shadow of the boy's dreams. He overhears the conversation of some of the vendors, who are ordinary English women, and the mundane nature of the talk drives home that there is no escape: bazaar or not, the boy is still in Dublin, and the accents of the vendors remind the reader that Dublin is a colonized city. The boy has arrived too late to do any serious shopping, but quickly we see that his tardiness does not matter. Any nice gift is well beyond the protagonist's price range. We know, from the description of the boy's housing situation and the small sum his uncle gives him, that their financial situation is tight. Though his anticipation of the event has provided him with pleasant daydreams, reality is much harsher. He remains a prisoner of his modest means and his city.