Joyce's 'the Sisters'

Introduction
This paper is an attempt to analyse the short story ‘The Sisters', by James Joyce and to establish some of the multiple possible relations with the other stories in Dubliners. ‘The Sisters' is the first short story in Dubliners. If we divide the stories according to the stages in life in Dublin –‘childhood, adolescence, adulthood and public life' –, ‘The Sisters' belongs to the period of childhood, as well as ‘An Encounter' and ‘Araby'.
The first paragraph sets the tone not only of ‘The Sisters', but also of the whole collection of stories:
‘There was no hope for him this time. (…) I said softly to myself the word paralysis.'
In the first paragraph we can relate some words as semantically linked. Such words are: dead, corpse, idle and paralysis. All of them mean ‘absence of movement'. Although the word ‘idle' in this context means ‘empty and casual', since it refers to the priest's words, playing with the polysemy of this word, and if we connect the word to the story as a whole, it can also mean ‘inactive, at rest'. We are suddenly plunged into a universe of hopelessness. Disheartened, paralysed, such is the way Dubliners are portrayed. Dublin itself may be regarded as the personification of misery and despair, as well as the main character throughout all the stories. The Irish –and their souls– are described as a community which is paralysed.
In ‘The Sisters' paralysis, the most recurrent theme in all stories, is personified, acquiring the status of a character:
‘I said softly to myself the word paralysis. (…) But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being.'
In this story, there is plenty of movement on the part of the narrator, especially walking:
‘Night after night I had passed the house.'
‘The next morning after breakfast I went down to look at the little house in Great Britain Street.'
‘I went in on tiptoe.'
‘When we rose and went up to the head of the bed I saw that he was not smiling.'
‘I walked away