SOURCE: Dettmar, Kevin J. H. “The Dubliners Epiphony: (Mis)Reading the Book of Ourselves.” In The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain, pp. 76-105. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.

In the essay below, Dettmar contends the textual clues in the stories of The Dubliners are “Joyce's means of reinforcing the story's hermeneutics, and pulling us, kicking and screaming, into a text with which we would prefer to keep a purely professional relationship.”

One of Joyce's strategies for unsettling our reading habits in “The Sisters” is the liberal use of that detective fiction stock-in-trade, the red herring. False clues proliferate throughout the story, at least one per page, and seemingly in proportion as we look for them. As Hugh Kenner writes, “Joyce delights in leaving us … queer things we may misinterpret, as if to keep alive in us an awareness traditional fiction is at pains to...