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Food and Drink
The narrator is presented with food and/or drink twice over the course of “The Sisters.” At the start of the text, the narrator sits and eats his supper in silence while his aunt, his uncle, and Old Cotter discuss Father Flynn’s passing and the narrator’s education. At the end of the text, the narrator is unable to eat the cream crackers that Nannie Flynn offers him after he and his aunt come to pay their respects and pray over Father Flynn’s body.
These two moments, which bookend the text, are ripe with symbolism. Nearly all of the characters in Dubliners eat or drink and, in most cases, food serves as a reminder of the threatening dullness of routine and/or the joys and difficulties of life. As the introductory short story in the collection, “The Sisters” is the first short story to feature this important symbol. In “The Sisters,” food is symbolically linked with mortality. The narrator is able to eat at the start of the story but he is unable to do so at the end. This is likely the case because he was offered food, a bodily indicator of life and nourishment, shortly after he came face-to-face with death for the first time, as opposed to simply talking about it or imagining it. After the narrator witnesses Father Flynn’s corpse, mortality becomes tangible as opposed to hypothetical. And, as a result, the narrator is unable to engage in such a life-giving activity. This symbol contributes to one of the text’s central ideas: that mourning blurs the lines between the living and the dead.
Father Flynn’s Clerical Robes
The narrator used to spend a lot of one-on-one time with Father Flynn at his house. The narrator informs the reader that his aunt used to give him a packet of High Toast, a brand of snuff tobacco, to bring to Father Flynn for these visits. The narrator explains that Father Flynn would use the snuff while he was giving the narrator a clerical or history lesson. The narrator describes how Father Flynn used to raise the snuff to his nose with shaky hands which meant that he “constant[ly] shower[ed]” himself with snuff and smoke, blackening his handkerchief and staining his clerical robes with a green tint.
The discolored clerical robes, like the dropped chalice, symbolize Father Flynn’s religious corruption. However, the stained robes have an additional and even more sinister implication. Snuff, and smoking in general, is considered a vice. Father Flynn has quite literally allowed one of his vices to tarnish his clerical robes which are supposed to represent his dedication to Catholicism. This deceptively harmless anecdote is complicated when one remembers the conversation that the narrator overhears between the uncle and Old Cotter. While it is never explicitly stated, Old Cotter likely implies that he thinks Father Flynn is a pedophile. If that is the case, the vice-stained clerical robes could symbolize the far more serious accusations that tarnish his reputation as a righteous religious figure.
