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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, like… the word simony in the Catechism.”
The window in question belongs to Father Flynn. Here, the narrator walks past Father Flynn’s home to see if he has died after being paralyzed by his third stroke. He attempts to come to terms with his mentor’s paralysis and reflects that it is a strange word. He compares it to “simony,” which he also finds to be a strange word. This is a reference to the buying or selling of ecclesiastical privileges like pardons or benefices. Joyce implies that Father Flynn is religiously corrupt by linking him with simony.
“And what do you think but there [Father Flynn] was, sitting up by himself in the dark in his confession-box, wide-awake and laughing-like softly to himself?”
Eliza Flynn delivers this line at the very end of the text when she tells the narrator and his aunt that they all knew that Father Flynn was sick when he went missing until two priests found him laughing to himself in a confession booth. Father Flynn went mad within the confines of his own church which symbolizes his deteriorating relationship with the priesthood. Here, Joyce suggests that the rituals of religion lead to corruption. The crippling quality of religion resurfaces in other stories like “Grace,” in which Joyce more directly questions the role of the Church in the lives of Dubliners.
