James Joyce's Theme of Paralysis
... feel that young lads should play together and that the friendship between an elderly man and a young boy is “bad for children because their minds are so impressionable.” The young boy becomes angry at their suggestion that he is a child and restrains himself from angry words. Later that night, the young boy is haunted by the face of death. He is paralyzed by a smiling face of the old priest and tries to make light of the images by thinking of Christmas. The next day, the young boy visits the shop where the old priest would sit by the fire. He reads the card that announces the death of Rev. James Flynn. He is disturbed and finds that hasn’t the courage to go inside and look (paralyzed by his confirmation that his friend is dead). While continuing his walk down the street, it is here that we understand the boy’s feelings toward the priest. He claims “I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death.” This suggests that although he liked their friendship and the things that the priest taught him, he felt paralyzed in his world of adults and discouraged at becoming like them in his future. Later that night, the young boy and his family visit the house of the priest where the two sisters live that cared for him. The priest is laid out in a coffin where the visitors can come to pay their respects to him; this is called the house of mourning. When the young boy enters the room he is on tiptoe. While kneeling at the foot of the bed, he pretends to pray but is distracted by someone else’s mutterings. Again he sees the image of the priest smiling, referring to his paralysis. But when he looks at his friend, he sees the face of death holding a chalice loosely in his hands. The same chalice that he had earlier learned that the priest had dropped and broken some time before. This broken chalice is a symbol of his insanity, which the young boy is learning of after his friend’s death. After their prayers, they go downstairs for some sherry and biscuits. This symbolizes the partaking of the sacraments. The young boy refuses and in doing so refuses the sacraments of the Church in which he is paralyzed. I think that he is also suggesting that the sisters cannot give him the...