It can be said that every story in the collection Dubliners by James Joyce has a tale of its own where “paralysis” is a central theme in all the stories. The idea of “paralysis” can mean a number of different things to different people depending upon their interpretation of a certain text. In general, what “paralysis” does is inhibit a character from doing what they want to do or know they should do, as if there is a kind of shadow in their life, just lurking and haunting them in the darkness. These shadows especially play an important role in two stories from the collection, “The Sisters” and “The Dead”; they act as a sort of imprisonment for the main character.

In “The Sisters”, the narrator and main character is a nameless boy. The boy says at the beginning of the story, “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 name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear” (“The Sisters”, 2). From this, the reader sees that the boy does not really know how to respond to the priest’s inevitable death. What kind of relationship exists between the boy and Father Flynn is hard to determine because the reader only sees their relationship through the eyes of the boy. As the reader is introduced to other characters in the story, they start to learn bits of information about the nature of their relationship, but the reader is still somewhat left in the dark.

Throughout the story the dialogue is ambiguous and leaves it up to the reader to fill in the blank. Whenever the reader comes close to thinking that more information on the boy’s relationship with Father Flynn might be disclosed, the author would deliberately make the characters trail off mid-sentence. For example, Old Cotter starts to say that it is bad for the boy to be around the priest too much, that he