When the narrator attends Father Flynn’s wake and approaches the priest's dead body, he describes the experience of seeing the corpse using imagery:
When we rose and went up to the head of the bed I saw that he was not smiling. There he lay, solemn and copious, vested as for the altar, his large hands loosely retaining a chalice. His face was very truculent, grey and massive, with black cavernous nostrils and circled by a scanty white fur. There was a heavy odour in the room—the flowers.
In this charged moment, Joyce intentionally uses imagery to engage his readers’ different senses. In this scene, they can see the priest’s “solemn and copious” body, as well as his “grey and massive” face with “cavernous nostrils” and “scanty white fur.” They can also smell the “heavy odor” of flowers. The imagery here is overall quite grotesque, inspiring readers to feel repulsed by the man, which is exactly how the narrator himself feels. That the smell of flowers is described as an “odour”—implying an unappealing scent—demonstrates how even floral fumes become unappealing in the face of the priest’s decaying body.
This imagery simultaneously helps bring readers into the scene and also indicates that Father Flynn’s death is—at least in the narrator’s experience—more disgusting than it is sad. Father Flynn was a corrupt, ineffective priest, and the imagery used in this passage viscerally conveys the many ways in which he has always disconcerted—and even continues to disconcert—the narrator.
As the narrator enters Father Flynn’s home in order to attend the priest's memorial service, he describes the scene and uses imagery in the process:
It was after sunset; but the window-panes of the houses that looked to the west reflected the tawny gold of a great bank of clouds. Nannie received us in the hall […] The room through the lace end of the blind was suffused with dusky golden light amid which the candles looked like pale thin flames […] I pretended to pray but I could not gather my thoughts because the old woman’s mutterings distracted me.
In this passage, Joyce brings readers deeper into the scene by encouraging them to visualize “the tawny gold of a great bank of clouds” reflected in the windows, the room full of “dusky golden light,” and candles that “looked like pale thin flames.” In addition to helping readers to see this golden, ethereal scene, Joyce also includes language that engages readers’ sense of hearing when he describes the “old woman’s mutterings” that interrupt the narrator’s thoughts.
The imagery in this scene simultaneously establishes the sacredness of mourning—with the gentle golden light mirroring the sacred sunsetting of a life—and also hints at the narrator’s discomfort with honoring the corrupt priest’s life in this holy way (as seen in his inability to stay focused on his own thoughts).
