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“Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears…But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.”
This is one of the first lines in the text. Here, the narrator contemplates Father Flynn’s impending death and fixates on his paralyzed state. The narrator is indeed frightened by his mentor’s situation but he is simultaneously drawn to the room where the paralyzed man lies. Furthermore, he has a morbid longing to witness the effects of Father Flynn’s third stroke. This is the reader's first introduction to the complicated and, at times, contradictory relationship that the narrator has with Father Flynn.
“I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I’d been free from something by his death.”
The narrator feels liberated after he learns of Father Flynn’s passing. This greatly confuses the young boy because he does not understand why he has such an unsympathetic response to his mentor’s death. The narrator is not in a “mourning mood” but, at the same time, he is unable to articulate why he feels this way. Instead, he uses a pathetic fallacy, the attribution of human emotion to things found in nature that are not human, and says that the weather does not want to mourn either. Perhaps he hopes that the universe can provide an explanation for his curious mood when he clearly cannot.
