Father Flynn's Light - New Journalism - 0 views
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Not much happens in “The Sisters,” the first story in James Joyce’s Dubliners. Some of the meaning in the story comes from descriptions of the light in and around the house where the town’s old priest, Father Flynn’s body lies. Other meanings come through the characters’ memories of the priest, expressed through incomplete dialog and longer reveries by the narrator. Additional meanings can be surmised from the vocabulary, some of the specific words Joyce uses in the story, “like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism.”
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Paul Allison on 26 Jul 09The idea of looking for meaning in the descriptions of the light came to me pretty quickly. Then I realized that I could find other aspects of the story where meanings come through: characters' dialog and internal monologue of the narrator; and in the use of language. I started to see that this initial paragraph could make my whole argument in short hand. Then I would develop these themes in the remainder of the writing.
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This essay began as a set of notes that I put on a Book Glutton version of Dubliners. I'm reading there this summer to see how it works. Then I copied the notes into a Google Doc, and I organized them and re-wrote them into this essay. With this essay I'm trying to figure out what I mean when I ask students to create a close reading of a text. What exactly are we asking students to do? We're not asking them to do research. Instead we are asking them to "use the language of the literature" (as an MIT professor put it in her syllabus ) n their own analysis of the particular, representative and evocatve sections of the text.
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The narrator, a young man is introduced in the first paragraph as someone on vacation. He has had some sort of relationship with the man who at that point lies paralyzed inside his house after he has had his third stroke. It’s night when the story starts and the narrator is out for his regular evening walk. The narrator doesn’t feel invited into outside the house, but he also has a morbid attraction to what is happening with the man who has had the stroke.
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This paragraph was a slight revision from the note I posted on the first paragraph on Book Glutton. I like the way this paragraph follows the arc of the story, not revealing much about the story beyond what we know in the first paragraph. It tries to explain the meanings we can gather from the descriptions that Joyce give us in that first paragraph.
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