The Topic of Paralysis. Parallels between The Sisters and The Dead as Beginning and Ending of James Joyce's „Dubliners

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature grade: 17 Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg language: English abstract: In this essay I want to analyse and compare the two short stories The Sisters and The Dead from James Joyce's Dubliners the analysis of the theme of paralysis being a second focus. The first story of the Dubliners collection The Sisters opens the Dubliners sequence and explicitly introduces the topic of paralysis one of Joyce's major concerns and a direct criticism in view of his home town Dublin. Therefore the topic of paralysis suggests further investigation especially concerning the content of The Sisters. In this essay I will ignore the earlier version of The Sisters which was printed in The Irish Homestead in 1904 to avoid confusion and to concentrate on Joyce's revised version which was published in 1914 as the beginning of the Dubliners collection. Moreover the revised Dubliners version is better suited to be discussed in my essay because of the fact that I want to take the general concept of paralysis within the whole collection of Dubliners into consideration. Nevertheless I will not take into account the contents of the other short stories from Dubliners because I want to concentrate on the comparison between The Sisters and The Dead in order to avoid digressions and to keep my main focus in mind. The Dead I chose for investigation because several parallels to The Sisters and similarities concerning the contents suggest to understand The Dead as a final coda or summary to the Dubliners collection. Another reason for my choice of the two stories is founded on personal considerations: if I compiled a collection of short stories I would put the best story at the ending as a climax and finale and the second best at the beginning to arouse the reader's interest and curiosity. I assume that Joyce pursued a similar strategy. First I want to give a