“I wouldn’t like children of mine,” he said, “to have too much to say to a man like that.” He returned to his pipe and finally spat rudely into the grate. I felt that his little beady black eyes were examining me but I would not satisfy him by looking up from my plate.

“God have mercy on his soul,” said my aunt piously. The old chap taught him a great deal, mind you and they say he had a great wish for him.” “The youngster and he were great friends. I knew that I was under observation so I continued eating as if the news had not interested me. “Well, so your old friend is gone, you’ll be sorry to hear.”

He began to puff again at his pipe without giving us his theory. “I think it was one of those … peculiar cases…. “I have my own theory about it,” he said. Tiresome old fool! When we knew him first he used to be rather interesting, talking of faints and worms but I soon grew tired of him and his endless stories about the distillery. He began to puff at his pipe, no doubt arranging his opinion in his mind. “No, I wouldn’t say he was exactly … but there was something queer … there was something uncanny about him. While my aunt was ladling out my stirabout he said, as if returning to some former remark of his: Old Cotter was sitting at the fire, smoking, when I came downstairs to supper. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism.īut now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. He had often said to me: “I am not long for this world,” and I had thought his words idle. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. James Joyce Dubliners short story The sisters (with links to where you can read the story on yeyebook) Index “Dubliners” book by James Joyce Short stories collection The nonconformist and critical character towards Irish society and the Catholic Church of the writer James Joyce appears evident in works like the short-story collection “Dubliners” published in 1914, of which we report below the short story: “The sisters” with full text in english. The Irish writer James Joyce is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century. James Joyce (James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, 2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, teacher, and literary critic.

The sisters dubliners