James Joyce himself wrote, "I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that . . . paralysis which many consider a city." Joyce believed passionately that Irish society and culture had been frozen in place for centuries by two forces: the Roman Catholic Church and England. The result, at the turn of the twentieth century, was one of the poorest, least-developed countries in all of Western Europe. And so images of paralysis recur throughout the collection obsessively, relentlessly, and without mercy. In the first line of "Sisters," and thus the first of Dubliners as a whole, it is revealed that Father Flynn has suffered a third and fatal stroke. Later, the unnamed protagonist of the story dreams of a gray face that "had died of paralysis," which is that of Father Flynn himself. This sets the tone for much of the material to follow.