The mood of “The Sisters” is depressing and bleak. The first half of the story is concerned with the young narrator’s inner experience as he processes the death of his teacher and mentor, Father Flynn, who (the story implies) may have had pedophilic tendencies. Though there are seemingly “positive” moments—such as when the narrator finds that he feels “freed” from something via the priest’s death—the mood is still bleak in such moments, as readers ask themselves why a young child would feel free after the death of his teacher.
The second half of the story—which comes as the narrator attends the priest’s memorial service with his aunt—is depressing in a different sort of way. After the narrator looks with disgust upon Father Flynn’s corpse, the story switches its focus onto an extended conversation between his aunt and the priest’s two sisters, Nannie and Eliza. The bleak mood emerges from readers’ awareness over the course of the conversation that these three adults all knew about Father Flynn’s declining mental and physical health yet never did anything to intervene. They discuss in hushed tones how “there was something queer coming over him latterly” and how “there was something gone wrong with him.” That the sisters did not alert church authorities about this—and that the narrator’s aunt did not protect the child by ending his private lessons with the priest—contribute to the bleak and disheartening mood at the end of the story.
