The writing style of “The Sisters” is, when it comes to narration, quite simple and direct. The narrator is a child who occasionally uses imagery and figurative language but primarily describes his thoughts and movements in an accessible and unadorned way.
It is in the dialogue between characters that Joyce’s style becomes more complex. Take the following passage on the first page of the story, for example, as the narrator is setting the scene:
Old Cotter was sitting at the fire, smoking, when I came downstairs to supper. While my aunt was ladling out my stirabout he said, as if returning to some former remark of his:
– No, I wouldn’t say he was exactly … but there was something queer … there was something uncanny about him. I’ll tell you my opinion … […] I think it was one of those … peculiar cases … But it’s hard to say …
The first part of the passage demonstrates the narrator’s direct language—he simply describes what he sees and hears when entering the kitchen—before switching into Old Cotter’s ellipsis-filled and evasive speech. In having Old Cotter fail to finish sentences like, “I wouldn’t say he was exactly …,” and, “I think it was one of those … peculiar cases …,” Joyce encourages readers to read between the lines and come to their own conclusions about what Old Cotter is implying. (Which, most likely, is that Father Flynn was a pedophile, had acquired a sexually transmitted infection, or both.)
Joyce makes the same stylistic choice later in the story when the narrator’s aunt is talking to Father Flynn’s sisters at his memorial service and asks, “–Did he … peacefully?” and “And everything … ?” Again, Joyce encourages readers to think hard about what the characters might be getting at here. (She is most likely asking if Father Flynn died peacefully and received his last rites despite his impropriety.) While Joyce’s Irish contemporaries might have had an easy time putting the pieces together, readers today may struggle with the intentional elisions, a risk that Joyce takes with these stylistic choices.
