Father Keon Character Analysis

Father Keon, a defrocked priest who still wears his uniform and cozies up to politicians, pokes his head into the Committee Room midway through the story looking for Fanning, a political operator. Everything about Keon is suspicious. Though the men call him “Father,” the men’s gossip reveals that he has been stripped of his clerical order for some unnamed moral offence. In the poor light, Joyce says “it was impossible to say whether he wore a clergyman’s collar or a layman’s.” By describing him this way and calling him “an actor,” Joyce very clearly suggests that Keon, the only character with direct ties to the Church, is morally untrustworthy. Along with Old Jack’s useless reliance on Catholic school to improve his drunkard son, Keon’s sketchiness adds to the feeling that Catholicism is a fallible judge of moral character. Ultimately, it’s Keon’s shadiness that clinches Joyce’s bitter argument that the Church was wrong to oust the late Nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell for an extramarital affair, a personal infraction that had no bearing on Parnell’s sparkling political abilities. Several details surrounding Keon also help reinforce Joyce’s view that the Church has no place in politics. First, Keon is the only entrant among the men to knock on the door, suggesting an unwelcome, outsider presence. Second, Joyce is clear that Keon’s coat contains only buttons, whereas the other men’s lapels show Parnell’s commemorative ivy leaf (the absence of the leaf marks Keon as uninterested in the true principles of the party). Third, when Henchy leaps up to light Keon’s way out with a candlestick, Keon “retreat[s]” from the flame—and since the candle’s fire came from the room’s fireplace, Joyce’s symbol for the spirit of Nationalism, Keon’s retreat symbolizes the Church’s natural antipathy to politics. Readers learn, however, that Keon is unnaturally close with Fanning and the Nationalist candidate Richard Tierney. For Joyce, this unholy marriage of Church and state contributed to Parnell’s unjust expulsion as well as Ireland’s enduring political malaise.