Death, Grief, and Mourning Theme Analysis

“The Sisters” is the portrait of a young man and his community as they navigate the death of Father Flynn, a local priest who was admired by some and distrusted by others. And because Father Flynn was such a polarizing figure, people respond to his death in a whole host of ways. All of those who mourn the priest equally struggle with feelings of relief, disgust, and other emotional responses to death that are not traditionally associated with mourning. Through presenting all of the complexities of the characters’ reactions to death, Joyce creates an honest portrayal of human grief and mourning.

At the very beginning of the story, the narrator anticipates Father Flynn’s death not only with fear, but also with a nervous sort of excitement. The narrator observes, “Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softy to myself the word paralysis […] It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.” Here, the narrator reveals both an expected and an unexpected emotional response to death. Readers can reasonably expect that a character would be afraid of paralysis, but not that he would experience a voyeuristic and perverse longing to witness its effect on the body. This ending to the opening passage sets readers up for an exploration of human responses to death that goes beyond simple grief.

Indeed, as the story progresses, the narrator admits to feeling relief that Father Flynn has passed, further complicating the story’s portrayal of grief and mourning. After he hears the news that the priest is dead, the narrator thinks to himself, “I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death.” This reaction is surprising, because at the beginning of the story the narrator thinks about the priest as if they had been very close. Additionally, other characters comment on the close relationship—even the strangely close relationship, which other characters seem to think may have been pedophilic—that existed between Father Flynn and the young man. However, in admitting that he feels freed by the older man’s death, the narrator demonstrates a more complex emotional relationship to death. He draws readers’ attention to the possibility that the narrator’s growth was in fact inhibited by Father Flynn’s influence, and that the priest’s death doesn’t only present him with occasion to mourn, but also the opportunity to grow in ways he hadn’t been able to while the older man was alive.

When the narrator and the other characters are paying their respects to Father Flynn in his coffin, Joyce makes it clear that none of them are sure how to act in the situation. They aren’t able to acknowledge the raw ugliness of death, and thus attempt to disguise this ugliness with performative religious rites and nostalgia. The narrator describes Father Flynn’s corpse as “solemn and copious, vested as for the altar […] His face was very translucent, grey and massive, with black cavernous nostrils.” In doing so, he paints a horrifying portrait of the dead body. However, Eliza, one of the women who took care of the priest in his old age, later says Father Flynn made a “beautiful corpse.” Here, Eliza’s blatant exaggeration—if not outright lie—betrays her own tremendous discomfort with acknowledging the reality of death.

While the narrator seems to have the emotional bandwidth to acknowledge even the most disturbing elements of death, the other characters try to ignore this discomfort, masking it with an appreciation of Father Flynn and his corpse that they imagine is appropriate. The narrator then approaches the coffin at the altar, where he sees that Father Flynn’s “face was very translucent, grey and massive, with black cavernous nostrils and circled by a scanty white fur. There was a heavy odor in the room — the flowers.” In this moment, Joyce’s description of Father Flynn’s body is extraordinarily grotesque. The language “fur” and “cavernous” make it seem like an animal rather than a human being is the object of the description. At the moment of the funeral, Father Flynn has been dressed in his best robes, and yet this was still not enough to mask the grotesque ugliness of a dead, aged body. The last sentence perfectly captures the attempt and failure to beautify death: odor is a word used to describe unpleasant smells, and yet the flowers, presumably, were placed at the altar to beautify and perfume the space. Description of them as an odor epitomizes the failure to make beautiful what is intrinsically grotesque.

The grotesque style that Joyce employs in narrating the story serves both to expose the ugly, dark, reality of death and, by contrast, to highlight the average person’s aversion to it. Through this contrast, Joyce is able to portray both an honest illustration of death itself and a thorough representation of human response to it. What’s more, death as it’s portrayed in the story isn’t only a bad thing. The narrator himself directly says the he feels “freed” by Father Flynn’s passing. Indeed, in many ways Joyce paints death as a liberating force, one that frees the local community from a man who espouses a type of religion that no longer serves them. Rather than portraying death as something to be mourned and dreaded, Joyce casts it as something to be honored when the right time has come. Not only are some of the characters relieved to be rid of Father Flynn; the priest himself laughs more and more often as his health deteriorates. This implies that rather than seeing death as something that is purely negative, the characters are able to see it as force that liberates humanity from what no longer serves it.