Not So Sneaky in Dublin
...ished is corruption. In “The Dead” the prevalence of corruption is not that obvious. It is touched upon when Aunt Julia and Aunt Kate are discussing Julia’s dismissal from the church choir because she was a woman, and now they only wanted little boys to sing the high parts. Mary Jane makes a crack at Mr. Browne’s religion and Mr. Browne rebuttals by saying, “And if I were in Julia’s place I’d tell that Father Healy straight up to his face…”(195). This is weird to see, because the Father is supposed to be seen as a holy man, one who could connect you with god. He is not supposed to be seen as someone to be yelled at. Based on his position, he is to be respected, even if his decisions are unfair. Another case of corruption deals with Gabriel and the paper he writes for. Gabriel is a catholic though he makes it apparent he does not wish to include himself with the traditional Irish. He writes a column for a paper ever Wednesday that is considered to be a Protestant paper. Miss Ivors points out the irony of this and calls him a “West Briton” (188) and Gabriel defends himself by saying that he only prefers the books they send him and his writing has nothing to do with politics. On the other hand, in “The Sisters” we see two clear examples of corruption. The first deals with the priest’s altered views of his job. He believes that his job is to be taken a lot more seriously than in fact it is meant to be. This can be seen in the boy’s thoughts: “His questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts. The duties of the priest toward the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them.”(5) It is clear to all that the job of a priest, although it may not be the easiest job on the earth, it is not at all as hard as the priest wanted the boy to think it was. The priest’s misinterpretation of the job is what the people believed to be a partial cause of his insanity. The other reason they believe he went insane was the dropping of the chalice. The holy chalice had been dropped on the floor, which was considered a horrible act. This had driven the priest insane thinking that he had done something to disrespect god. In reality, it was said not to have mattered considered that it had contained nothing, and it was the boy’s fault and not the priest’s. This led him to his paralyzed state of being. Joyce continues by adding paralysis into the mix of themes. In “The Dead” Gabriel tells an anecdote about his grandfather’s old horse. The horse circles around a statue and will not stop which makes Grandfather Morkan flustered. This was a more humorous view of the paralysis. A major example we see comes within Gabriel’s fight with Miss Ivors. After she has cornered him and called him a West Briton Gabriel has no rebuke: “He did not know how to meet her charge. He wanted to say that literature was above politics…He continued blinking his eyes and trying to smile and murmured lamely that he saw nothing political in writing reviews of books.”(188) Gabriel is paralyzed by the friendship they share and does not want to make a big fight out of this so he remains silent and does not tell her what he truly feels. He doesn’t even attempt an argument he just continues dancing and it is she that brings up the subject again. The last example of paralysis is the snow falling the last paragraph. The snow has become a liaison between the living the dead. The snow has paralyzed the two worlds, covering both graves obviously used by the dead and all the streets used by the living. It has literally paralyzed the world outside, but it has emotionally paralyzed Gabriel. The snow has made him realize that the past is not the past. The dead are still very much alive through the thoughts and feelings of other people. His night with Greta, his whole life has been paralyzed by the memory of this boy. In “The Sisters” the first instance of paralysis we come upon is when the narrator enters the kitchen to find old Cotter talking about the death of Father Flynn. When old Cotter starts to talk about the relationship that the boy and the father share the boy gets really angry and he “crammed [his] mouth with stirabout for fear [he] might give utterance to [his] anger.”(3) HE puts the food in his mouth so he won’t yell at old Cotter for his ignorance. While the narrator is at Father Flynn’s house we see two examples of paralysis. When the boy and his aunt first enter the house they are greeted by Nannie. We can infer from many passages, such as “As it would have been unseemly to have shouted at her, my aunt shook hands with her,”(6) that Nannie is deaf because the woman never speaks and just uses hand signals to get her points across. In this sense Nannie is paralyzed in the fact that she cannot talk to people, though she can gesture. The next time we see paralysis is when the boy goes to the room to see the body of Father Flynn and pay his respects. The three of them kneel down to pray but the boy “pretended to pray but [he] could not gather [his] thoughts”(6). It is ironic because this is supposed to be the time when you pay your respects to the person who has died, and Father Flynn had meant a lot to him. The last example is ultimately Father Flynn as a whole. Father Flynn has been paralyzed between life and death by his illness. He was becoming crazy basically waiting to die, so he was stuck living in a mentally paralyzed state. The final theme of the story is incompleteness. The first instance we see incompleteness in “The Dead” is within Gabriel’s character. He thinks of himself as above everyone, seen in the passage “He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning for her feared they would be above the heads of his hearers.”(179) And yet he is completely insecure when actually faced with criticism. When Greta jokes about the galoshes that Gabriel has made her wear in front of his two aunts, he gets nervous and laughs because he knows he’s supposed to. Also at the end of the story when eh finds out that Michael Furey was from Galway he assumes that the reason Greta had wanted to go th...