Father Flynn's Tragedy as a

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In “The Sisters”, the first story of Dubliners by James Joyce, Father Flynn is once selected to study at Irish College in Rome. Later when he teaches the young narrator the knowledge about Catholicism, he even additionally tells stories about Napoleon Bonaparte, which in practice has nothing to do with religion. Such facts indicate that Father Flynn must have been smart, promising, and ambitious in his youth; and he must have been the pride of his parents and sisters. But as a priest, Father Flynn is in fact lonely, weary, “queer” and “uncanny”. What causes the big difference in him? The answer to this question exists in no other places but the reality he encounters in Dublin. During the years he serves as a priest, the traditional faith is not regarded as necessary and holy as before, and priests no longer “preach what was quite orthodox” (Joyce 177). In other words, what Father Flynn once cherished holy is abandoned in Dublin. Adequate revelation of this aspect can be found in “Grace”, another story in Dubliners. In “Grace”, the attitude of common Dubliners towards religion can never be remarked as pious. The typical representatives of such characters are Mr. and Mrs. Kernan. Mr. Kernan “had been converted to the Catholic faith at the time of his marriage”, but in fact he “had not been in the pale of the Church for twenty years” (168). As for his wife, “her faith was bounded by her kitchen” (169).
The reality that Dublin presents is just what Marx criticizes in On the Jewish Question: “the real God of bourgeois society is money: it rules over the human beings that bow to it and degrades traditional gods by turning them into commodities” (Rehman 38). Living in such a situation, Father Flynn can only feel that “the duties of the priesthood was too much for him” (Joyce 10). On the other hand, because “he was too scrupulous always (10)”, he cannot preach like Father Purdon, a priest in “Grace”. Father Purdon usually preaches to businessmen “in a businesslike way” and he even declares that Jesus Christ “understood that all men were not called to the religious life, that by far the vast majority were forced to live in the world and, to a certain extent, for the world” (187). In a word, Father Flynn works as one who cannot “fulfill himself in his work but denies himself” (Marx 85).
As he realizes the fact that he can never achieve anything magnificent through religious work and it is impossible for him to take any action to do something worthy, Father Flynn almost unconsciously falls into a state of impoverishment, abandoning himself. So, in the story there are such words:

Perhaps my aunt would have given me a packet of High Toast for him and this present would have roused him from his stupefied doze” (Joyce 4).

This description vividly shows that in most time of an ordinary day Father Flynn doesn’t read Bible, or pray as a devoted Christian. He just dozes as a poor, lonely and exhausted old man. Only the snuff brought to him by the young narrator can temporarily release him from his meaninglessness and relationlessness.
In his loneliness and hopelessness, the visits of the young narrator comfort him, please him, and later, dangerously, lead him into an increasing interest in the boy, who admires his knowledge about “the meaning of the different ceremonies of the Mass and of the different vestments worn by the priest” (5). Father Flynn’s love towards the boy is certainly from the nature of human, but it is more than that. It appears abnormal and ambiguously immoral, as depicted in the boy’s narrative:

In the dark of my room I imagined that I saw again the heavy grey face of the paralytic... It began to confess to me in a murmuring voice and I wondered why it smiled continually and why the lips were so moist with spittle (3).

This fragment shows that the young narrator is not clear about the intention of Father Flynn. He is only aware of the quality of pleading in his voice. Compared with the description about the “queer old josser” in “An Encounter”, the above-quoted can provide more clues about what kind of person Father Flynn has become. In “An Encounter”, the narrator of the story is also a boy. He relates the nameless old man in this way: “his voice, as he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him” (22). This quote shows a strong resemblance between Father Flynn and the nameless old man: They speak in the same way, as murmuring and pleading. Associating Father Flynn with the nameless old man, especially from the aspects of age, appearance, behavior and voice, is helpful in understanding Father Flynn. As the “queer old josser” is apparently a pervert, Father Flynn is “a potential child molester” (Zhang 20). This assumption coheres with the fact that Mr. Cotter uses “queer” and “uncanny” in his remarks about Father Flynn. It also coheres with the behavior that “Old Cotter looked at me for a while. I felt that his beady black eyes were examining me” (Joyce 2). So when interpreting the ellipses in “The Sisters”, Marian Eide asserts that “the possibility of an erotic love between an older and younger man centered around knowledge is dumped into the ellipses in both the uncle’s and Cotter’s statements” (Eide 38).
The intimacy with the young narrator is perhaps the most pleasant period in Father Flynn’s late life, but it puts him into an embarrassing dilemma: Should he still make efforts to follow God or simply subject to his physical desire? We can imagine that he surely makes efforts to restrain the latter. But as he realizes that he can never fulfill himself in his religious service, and he is too weak to resist the temptation from the loveliness of the boy, he is inevitably stuck in a miserable dilemma.
Just at the time Father Flynn cannot get out of his helplessness and before he really does something “impressionable” to the boy, a chalice breaks. To others, the breaking is nothing serious, but to Father Flynn, it is a token from heaven, which means that God knows what he thinks, and has abandoned him as a sinner. So, as depicted in the following part, Father Flynn changes a lot:

After that he began to mope by himself, talking to no one and wandering about by himself. So one night he was wanted for to go on a call and they couldn’t find him anywhere. They looked high up and low down; and still they couldn’t see a sight of him anywhere...then they got the keys and opened the chapel...there he was, sitting up by himself in the dark in his confession-box, wide awake and laughing-like softly to himself (Joyce 10-11).

The breaking of the chalice is very significant in the story. It serves as a gnomon. Like the upright marker on a sundial indicates the place of the sun by casting shadow, it illuminates the internal-division in Father Flynn: the breakup of his relations to God and the breakup of his relations to his body, or human nature.
It is true that Father Flynn does not physically commit what his inner impulse draws him to do. Despite this, according to Biblical teaching that “anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” [1], Father Flynn has spiritually sinned against God. As a priest, he certainly knows Bible very well, so he cannot be unaware that “there was something gone wrong with him” (Joyce 11). Keeping this analysis in mind, a reader who knows Dante’s works can realize that “no hope” in the first sentence of “The Sisters” is full of metaphorical meaning. It actually “alludes to the inscription on the gates of Hell in the Inferno: ‘Abandon every hope, who enter here’ ” (Bulson 36).
“The Sisters” reveals that Father Flynn is not an angel or a saint but a physical man. As religion cannot offer him the possibility to achieve fulfillment in spirit but economic poverty and psychic disappointment, he gives up his young ambition and gradually falls into a state of marginalization. So later when he has the chance to teach and befriend the young narrator, he perhaps at first has the intention to realize his own dream in the boy, but soon, as he becomes more and more intimate with the boy, his love towards the boy grows abnormal. In this way, he is inevitably trapped in a dilemma between his relations to God and his relations to human desires. Hopelessly, the two aspects belong to contradictory domains and are mutually exclusive. At last, with the break of the sacred chalice, Father Flynn cannot help but collapse, and then stay “in the dark in his confession-box, wide awake and laughing-like softly to himself” (Joyce 11).
The tragedy of Father Flynn unveils the truth that religion cannot mentally or physically emancipate a man from reality that he encounters in actual life. When a man fails to locate his proper position in his relationship to religion and to his physical desire, he will suffer from being alienated from human nature. He will live neither as a saint nor as a human being.