The main features of James Joyce’s work

The Sisters
“The Sisters,” which opens the Dubliners collection, introduces the book’s “childhood” division, and was the first story in the collection to be written. The original version of this story appeared in the August 13, 1904, issue of the Irish Homestead under the pseudonym Stephen Daedalus, which Joyce briefly used. (He later claimed to regret the decision not to publish from the start under his own name.) Joyce greatly revised “The Sisters” before it appeared in the 1914 publication of the book.
“The Sisters” introduces many of the themes that define the descriptive trajectory of the collection: narrow, though often unstated, cultural norms; ambiguity regarding the consequences of events; and an inability to take definitive action. It focuses the reader’s attention on the psyche of the narrator, a young boy, as he struggles to come to grips with the world that he inhabits. One sees his frustrations as he strives to engage change in a narrow and restrictive society. In the process, the discourse underscores the early and presumably lifelong influence of the claustrophobic environment described throughout the collection. As “The Sisters” traces the reactions of the unnamed young narrator as he endeavors to cope with his feelings about the death of an old priest, Father James Flynn, who had befriended him, it also outlines a pattern of conflict and frustration common to most of the major characters in Dubliners.
The story opens somewhat deceptively, with a seemingly straightforward phrase that captures the complexity of the story without prescribing a way to resolve the issues that will arise from it: “There was no hope for him this time.” With graceful but arresting brevity the narrative sums up the physical troubles of Father Flynn as he struggles to overcome the debilitating effects of his third stroke. More significantly, however, Joyce also obliquely introduces the notion of the utter hopelessness that seems to surround Father Flynn’s life. Finally, through the momentary ambiguity over to whom the word “him” refers and what has precipitated this lack of hope, the phrase also suggests the danger of spiritual desolation with which the boy must contend over the course of the story. The words paralysis, gnomon, and simony, all occurring in the opening paragraph, underscore the physical, spiritual, and religious decay found in the story.
In the opening lines, the young narrator quickly reveals that he is attempting to keep watch over Father Flynn’s house in anticipation of the priest’s death, setting for himself the goal of being the first outside the immediate family to know of the old man’s passing. However, the boy is frustrated in this desire, for when he comes down to supper one evening in the home of his aunt and uncle, with whom he lives, a neighbor, Mr. Cotter, has already brought the news. In this scene, the boy must deal not only with his own immediate disappointment and grief but also with his uncle’s and Mr. Cotter’s ambivalence toward Father Flynn.
As the reality of Father Flynn’s death begins to sink in, the boy undertakes a closer scrutiny of the priest’s life than what he had previously allowed himself. Although Father Flynn was diligent in his religious instruction of the boy, the child’s recollections suggest that his teacher’s own response to Catholic dogma had become highly idiosyncratic, to say the least. Indeed, the most striking elements of the priest’s behavior recollected by the boy go well beyond what one might explain as the eccentricities of a man of advancing age and in fact seem to reflect a corrosive bitterness and a profound disillusionment linked to a fundamental loss of belief.
The next evening, the boy and his aunt go to pay their respects at the house in Great BritainStreet in which, during the final days of his life, Father Flynn had lived with his sisters. The tawdriness of the home adds to the aura of shameful gloom that has permeated the narrative. In the story’s closing pages, as Father Flynn’s sister Eliza describes what she chooses to see as her brother’s eccentric behavior, the priest’s profound alienation from society becomes all too evident to readers. Eliza tries to overcome her own chagrin over her brother’s actions with a simple bromide meant to explain it all away, “[H]e was too scrupulous always” (D 17). Nonetheless, when she recounts how two other priests had discovered her brother one night sitting “in his confession-box, wideawake and laughing-like softly to himself” (D 18), the tremendous strain that his erratic conduct has produced in his sisters becomes all too apparent to readers.

In Father Flynn’s seeming inability to counteract the despair and lethargy that blighted his last years, in his probable loss of faith, and in his certain mental breakdown, Joyce introduces multiple manifestations of the spiritual paralysis that underlies all of Dubliners. At the same time, he deftly avoids allowing despair to impose a single unambiguous approach to the story or to the rest of the work. Too much uncertainty surrounds Father Flynn’s behavior and its impact on the boy to allow a simple interpretation. Further, although the poignancy not only of Father Flynn’s life but of the lives of all the characters invites the reader’s empathy, even this feeling is not unmixed. A willful smallness circumscribes all their lives, making unalloyed sympathy impossible.

Even the story’s title resists easy explanation. Foregrounding the women who will not appear until late in the narrative and who will function only at the margins of the narrative leaves us unsure of the degree of irony Joyce means to convey. In the end, “The Sisters” offers a keen sense of what Joyce himself described as “the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal [that] hangs round my stories” (Letters, I.64) without forcing upon the reader a particular meaning for that impression.
Despite the significance of context for the cohesion of the collection, stylistic expression is as important to Joyce as thematic development. His concern with and careful attention to word order and overall structure began with Chamber Music, a work completed prior to Dubliners, and it remains a central element in his compositional strategy throughout his oeuvre. Indeed, as his thematic endeavors became more complex and diffuse, stylistics functions as the primary means by which Joyce achieves coherence in and among all of his writings. Although some of Joyce’s methods in the short stories may seem understated when compared with the formal experimentation that he undertook in subsequent prose fiction—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake—time and again passages in Dubliners wonderfully adumbrate fully developed techniques that characterize the later work. Indeed, realizing the stylistic and thematic virtuosity of the short stories stands as the first step to full comprehension of their significance.

In “Araby,” for example, religious iconography counterpoints the basic narrative thread, making both ironic and straightforward commentary on the quest of the young narrator. In “An Encounter,” “Two Gallants,” and “Counterparts,” detailed representations of Dublin geography enforce the claustrophobic atmosphere of each story. In “A Mother,” “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” and “The Dead,” Dublin’s social mores reflect not only universal human concerns but the very precise ways in which they are played out in Joyce’s city. Perhaps most significantly, throughout the collection a series of rich literary, theological, philosophical, and cultural allusions bring a variety of perspectives and possible meanings to the text, and they test a reader’s ability to comprehend and unify the diverse associations.

While readers rightly see Dubliners as marking an early stage in Joyce’s creative development, one needs to avoid a simplistic sense of what that means. One can certainly trace a growing artistic sophistication over the course of Joyce’s fiction writing. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake each manifests abilities not evident in the works that preceded it. Nonetheless, as early as Dubliners one can find the fundamental artistic elements that will characterize Joyce’s writing over the course of his career as an author. Furthermore, it is important to remember that these stories were created during a time of economic trial, emotional upheaval, and cultural disorientation. Joyce, Nora, and his growing family were struggling to adjust to a radically different environment from life in Dublin, and evidence of those trials, while not explicit, is certainly embedded in his short stories.