Paralysis, Simony, and Gnomon in James Joyce’s "Dubliners"

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James Joyce’s “The Sisters” was first written on commission as an isolated story for The Irish Homestead (Gabler xv–xvi). When included as the first in the short story cycle Dubliners, the opening paragraph was amended (e.g. Kerins 243; compare the reprint of the original version in Norris, Contexts 204) to include the three concepts of paralysis, simony, and gnomon, presented by the young first person narrator. According to Murray McArthur, the purpose of this and other emendations was to “[shape] ‘The Sisters’ as the macro-index or riddle that stands as first text or opening frame” not only of Dubliners, but of the entire Joycean canon (245). Thus one can fairly assume that all revisions of and additions to the first version of “The Sisters” are important for understanding the entire cycle – or oeuvre – it was meant to frame; and that italicized additions to the opening paragraph are even more so.

In this essay, I will try to demonstrate not only the significance and signification of, but also the interconnectedness between, this triune of ideas in Joyce’s Dubliners. I will try to demonstrate that they combine to configure both each other, the texts and its characters, and what the cycle is intended to represent. Moreover, I will argue that in the final analysis – and specifically through the method of which they are presented textually – these concepts are employed as means to involve readers in the meaning-making of the text of Dubliners, and, by extension, to facilitate readers’ understanding of themselves. Thus, the main purpose of this essay is to discuss how paralysis, simony, and gnomon function in Dubliners. 

As per the assignment text, I will concentrate my analysis on two of the cycle’s stories, the consecutive “Eveline” and “After the Race.” I will, however, relate my discussion to other stories whenever I deem it necessary or instructive, including a closer examination of the section from “The Sisters” where the concepts in question first appear.

Defined congruently, paralysis is a physical state of immobility, resulting from an injury to the nervous system (Oxford English Dictionary [OED]); simony is the sin of bartering in “church offices or spiritual pardons” (Gabler 3); and gnomon, in the Euclidian sense, is a “parallelogram with a corner in the shape of a similar parallelogram removed” (ibid.) – that is, the resultant L-shape upon removing an identically proportioned but smaller parallelogram from the corner of a larger. However conceptually transparent, what these words respectively represent in Dubliners is – and perhaps successively – less so. Simony is appropriated from a religious context without severing its etymological roots, but is, as we shall see, applicable to many more instances of reductive and pecuniary temporalizing of the transcendent. Gnomon, and what it is meant to allude to in the text, is the least immediately understandable and most elusive of the three. As far as I can recall, the word is mentioned only once in the entire Dubliners collection. Initially, I will follow the explication of the concept by Bernard Benstock and conceive of it as “a nonappearance suggesting a presence made palpable only by the concept of its absence” (520), that is – like the overtly non-appearing parallelogram-shaped vacuity in the parallelogram with a missing piece – as a something that is not sufficiently “there” but still known or efficacious in important ways. However, I will expand upon both definition and application throughout, both in strictly geometrical and in etymological terms.   

Of the three concepts, we have several indicators suggesting that paralysis occupy if not the more prominent position, then at least the most overt one. We know that Joyce, when describing his purpose for Dubliners, said that he had “[chosen] Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to [him] the centre of paralysis” (letter quoted in Norris, Preface ix), highlighting this idea’s thematic importance for future reception of the cycle. When reading Dubliners, several scenes stand out as immediately recognizable instances of paralysis. And a final indicator is the part of the paragraph wherein the three concepts are introduced:

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 gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the catechism. 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. (3)[1]

On re-reading, we know that this is a thematic prophecy – uttered by a young boy in a moment perhaps of naïve perspicacity – of a specter that will haunt the remainder of the story cycle. Not only paralysis’ effects, paradoxically both fearsome and enticing, but also a notion of a possible referent, a “maleficent and sinful being,” are suggested by the narrator. Moreover, it is worth noting the relation between the boy and the three concepts: Uttering them softly to himself, the boy concentrates on the words, rather than their meanings – the word paralysis, the word gnomon, the word simony – and the effect the sound of them has on him: They sound strangely in his ears – and it is even the sound, rather than an idea or meaning, that is the subject for the ensuing simile. A conceptual reverberation is probably not unintended here.

Moreover, according to McArthur, the textual development of the relation between Father Flynn’s symptoms and the boys ruminations is suggesting that his symptoms are caused “not by paralysis but by ‘the word paralysis’,” (250) further suggesting uncertain and elusive referents for the words the boy utters this night, what McArthur calls an “indexicality that relentlessly insists or affirms but that always […] stops there” (250–1). This insisting but inconclusive conceptual indexicality is what I will explore further in my analysis and comparison of “Eveline” and “After the Race.”

A sharply contrasting counterpoint to the paralysis being general for many of its characters, a longing for “someplace else” is a recurrent theme in Dubliners: The dream takes the boy in “The Sisters” to exotic Persia (7), perhaps escaping from his conflicting emotions after the death of Father Flynn; in “Araby,” the lure of the Orient is transplanted to Dublin itself, near enough to be an object of a failed quest for the story’s young protagonist; and Little Chandler longs, in all likelihood to no avail, to escape the “dust and soot” of Dublin for London, imagining that “if you wanted to succeed you had to go away” (59). What all these longings have in common is their paralytic ineffectuality: The indistinct nature of the destinations and what will be achieved by arriving there, and the lack of initiative for actual traveling on behalf of the characters.

Eveline epitomizes this longing: We follow her throughout her day of internal debate, of trying “to weigh each side of the question” (28): Should she stay, or should she go. She has almost inadvertently met a sailor – they “had come to know each other” (29) – and has, when we meet her, already “consented to go away” with him (28). Eveline’s internal weighing of pros and cons takes up almost the entire story, leading to the final scene where she is literally – both physically and emotionally – immobilized by her inability to choose, resulting, of course, in her having to accept the default non-choice choice: staying.

According to Margot Norris, one cannot understand the agony of Eveline’s choice without considering its important historical backdrop, the Irish exodus to The New World (“The Perils of ‘Eveline’” 285). During and after the great famine of the mid-nineteenth century, millions left Ireland hoping for a better future. They had to make their choice of leaving or staying behind amidst a confusing array of diverging sources of information, conflicting in terms of reliability, purpose, and content: The stories from those who actually left, and perhaps more or less truthfully claimed to have “made it”; and the “varieties of propaganda both to stimulate and allure migrants to the New Worlds, or to stem the tide of emigration with frightening warnings and exposés” (ibid.). Finally, there is a finality to this choice, one that also Eveline recognizes (27): If one chooses to leave, chances are that one will never see one’s home again.

These conflicting sources of information converge in Eveline – but her plight is perhaps even more pronounced than it was for the ones who have gone before her: She is alone in her choice, her solitude in choosing made explicit by the distant presence or complete but still highly palpable absence of all other characters in the story – following the abovementioned definition by Benstock, an extremely functional gnomonic quality of Eveline’s predicament. Not once is Eveline able to actually receive advice or share her thoughts with a confidante – her closest friend, her favorite brother, and her mother are all dead. Deprived of this, Eveline herself tries to amend the absence by inviting her well-informed but spurious knowledge of the others’ voices into her decision-making – all of them explicitly but differently vague and ambiguous. Frank is her sole source of information of her prospects in the New World. As has been perceptively pointed out (cf. the discussion in Norris, “The Perils of ‘Eveline’” 283–4), we have only Frank’s own and perhaps romanticized or fictionalized version of what awaits her: “He had fallen on his feet in Buenos Ayres, he said,” she thinks (30) – and how do we know if this is not him telling her what he assumes a girl like her, in that day and age, needs to hear from an émigré like him in order to perhaps consent to go with him? Her father, perhaps rightly so, has little regard for “these sailor chaps” (ibid.), and probably, we infer, not their alluring promises either. Her mother still binds her – perhaps less strongly as time passes – through her deathbed promise “to keep the home together as long as she could” (ibid.) – but how much longer can she? And her colleagues – stand-ins for the patriotic sentiment, perhaps – will, she thinks, disapprove of her leaving, and “say she was a fool” – but perhaps Eveline won’t mind: “She would not cry many tears at leaving the stores” (28). The result of the debate between these voices is inconclusive.

After recounting to herself the death or departure of her family and friends in the second paragraph, Eveline thinks to herself, “everything changes. Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her home” (27). Like what “others” does she want to go away? The nearest textual referents are “the Waters,” having gone back to England, but that is not her prospective destination; we do not know until later that her brother Harry “was nearly always down somewhere in the country” (28), and he is only one person; and the others who have “gone away” in the preceding paragraph are all dead. Perhaps the reference is cataphoric, to the priest, who, according to her father, “is in Melbourne now” (28)? On the other hand, and even though the subject of mass emigration is nearly absent from the story, still, Norris contends, it is present enough for Eveline to have at least “subliminal awareness” (“The Perils of ‘Eveline’” 285) of the history of migration leading up to her day of choosing. Are we then to conclude, like Norris (286), that the drove of countrymen and -women whose footsteps she contemplates following are “the others” Eveline is referring to?

Perhaps it is necessary to keep this ambiguity unresolved in order to imagine Eveline’s qualms. She is poised as a solitary arbiter between conflicting pressures and wishes. This, then, becomes an exercise in gnomonic geometry, in completing pictures with known unknowns: What will her life be like in Buenos Aires? Will there be a “home waiting for her” there, as he has promised (29)? Frank is the only source of information, and we are lead to believe that his information is more fictional than real. The reality she sees more clearly is her potential absence from the home she already has. As the story progresses and the vision of leaving becomes more substantiated, the situation she is in now becomes less intolerable: “Now that she was about to leave, she did not find it a wholly undesirable life” (29). Thus, perhaps leaving like the others is not about where anyone went (England, overseas, or beyond), but the fact that they left, and the tangible and comparably more intelligible absence they created. This is a piece of the picture she is able to imagine, and perhaps what is most threatening in the end. As Benstock summarizes, what she is most readily able to visualize is “herself as absent from her own home, a fading, yellowing, discarded memory, a vacuum that only the dust fills. It is the fear of nonexistence that eventually paralyzes Eveline into remaining a ghost in her own home” (523). The abundance of dust in her home (27) marks the absence of the others, and she will perhaps rather keep dusting than herself to start gathering dust.

In the decisive mediating scene between her passivity at the window and the ineffective departure, the memory of her mother is what rouses her, her “life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness” fills her with “terror” and a wish to “escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life” (31). But when at the docks together, her fear of the unknown is greater than the fear of the commonplace, and instead of giving her life, she imagines that “he would drown her” (ibid.). In the end, she is reduced to a state of total passivity, no longer human but “like a helpless animal” (32). This is the fearsome work of paralysis, as we have been promised in the story’s frame.

Examples of reductive monetarism abound in Dubliners: The capitalization of Irish culture in “A Mother”; the money-seeking snitch and womanizer Corely – or is it Whore-ley (Gabler 41)? – and his sycophantic sidekick in “Two Gallants,” engaged in a triangular parasitic economic ecology; and the cle(a)ver bartering of Catholic-morality-induced potential social condemnation for “a good sit” in “The Boarding House” (he retains his morality; she gets her daughter of her hands, with a promise of her support).

But “After the Race” is without doubt where the biggest money is in play: The backdrop is a rally in the Irish countryside terminating in Dublin, where drivers from the powerful nations display the most potent symbol of their wealth and industry: their cars. The young Irish protagonist, Jimmy, is a progeny of Dublin’s Catholic money, and is poised to make – with his father’s blessing – his first big investment, in the French automobile industry.

According to James Fairhall, the story was built on an actual race taking place in Ireland some years prior to Joyce’s writing, of which Joyce must have been aware (299). Judging from the preceding media frenzy, there was a general expectancy not only of a spectacular performance by the drivers, but also of an influx of continental money to Ireland; local employment; and of the inspiration of the young to educate themselves in the new sciences for the benefit of the whole nation (299–300). As might have been expected, most of these “golden promises” never came true (301), and Fairhall suggests that “After the Race” was Joyce’s reply to the “boosters” of the race (301–2). The title surely indicates an aftermath of an excitement, the chilling reality that you wake up to after the elation of a magnificent event. Moreover, it also provides other angles to and content for the concepts of paralysis, gnomon, and simony, contrasting to the ones in “Eveline,” further elaborating on these ideas.

Already from the beginning, we are witnesses to a gnomonic relationship in a more strictly geometrical sense, in the blue car careering through the Irish countryside. The two French drivers are in the front, the Hungarian Villona and young Jimmy Doyle in the back. They are all “almost hilarious” (32), but Doyle, “the fourth member of the party … was too excited to be genuinely happy” (33). The other three members of this shape are all holding their own in the car: Villona is in “excellent spirits,” whereas the French “[fling] their laughter and light words over their shoulder” (34). Poor Jimmy is the odd one out, having to “strain forward” to keep up with the conversation, all the time distracted by Villona’s unconcerned humming, the experience being “not altogether pleasant” (34). Although very much present in the car, still an important part of Jimmy – genuineness, perhaps, or a factor of his constitution – is notoriously absent from the relation these men form.

We learn that the reason for Jimmy’s elated excitement is the triple factors of “rapid motion through space,” – interestingly, what paralysis is not, but is he not, paradoxically, paralyzed by it? – “notoriety,” and the “possession of money” (34), and today he has them all, notoriety secured through the public display of his association with the French. But he is already unsettled when we first meet him, perhaps elevated to fall, a foreshadowing of his subsequent ruinous descent as the evening progresses.

We learn that his now “merchant prince” father (33), a nationalist in his youth, has “modified” his ideals (ibid.), probably a necessary requisite in order to be “fortunate enough” (ibid.) to secure contracts with the representatives of the establishment, the protestant-led and loyalist police. This selling out enabled him to send his son to the best Anglo-protestant schools in Dublin and England, perhaps more with the intention to cast him in the right glamour and gain the proper social and business connections than to be educated; his son’s excesses, necessary for that purpose, make the father “covertly proud” (33). Perhaps as an ironic foreshadowing (as suggested by Benstock 527), Jimmy, on his way down, momentarily forgets his father’s exemplary modification on his way up, and, “under generous influences, [feels] the buried seal of his father wake to life within him” (36) in the presence of the Englishman Routh. He is quickly subdued by their elegant and eloquent French host. His servility is revealed when, after his speech before the final card-game, he concludes that “it must have been a good speech” not because of his own evaluation of its quality, but by the exuberant ovations from the others (37). Deprived of his ability for reasoning, subdued after his outburst of patriotism, his “wit was flashing” (37) and he becomes easy prey to the other “devils of fellows” (38), not knowing who is winning, only that “he was losing” (37). The story ending before we can be certain, we are lead to assume that his investment will end in the same way as his poker game, with a huge loss – the penultimate paragraph’s ambiguous “he would lose, of course” (38) referring back to the settling of debts after the poker game for Jimmy, but toward the future of his investment for the justifiably pessimistic reader.

Juxtaposing the gnomonic geometry (cf. McArthur, especially 252) on Eveline’s dilemma – from left to right clockwise, with a known ABC and an absent D if the parallelogram is to be “completed”  – we can posit Eveline as a mediating B between factors prompting her to leave – her own desire, the dissolution of her network, and the general social upheaval at the time – on the one hand, and the factors keeping her there – her promise to her mother, her duties in her house, the general patriotism and subsequent scorn if she were to leave – on the other. Frank, his story and their relation constitutes the unknown D, the angle that only can be completed through fiction. And interestingly, as she traverses (again, we assume the perhaps simplistic but still enticingly structured and structuring geometry here) diagonally from B to D, gradually substantiating an image of the home she envisions with Frank, the more real becomes her own initial position, by the absence her movement away from it creates.

Although surrounded by people, Jimmy is as solitary in his company as Eveline is alone at her window, his relations as disingenuous as his happiness. Albeit altogether more materialistic, as with Eveline, his hope lies “away,” and his means of getting them are amassed – through the simoniac “modification” of his father – in exchange for a less temporal ideal. His predicament is more convoluted, he is surrounded by a confusion of representatives from foreign powers, but his trajectory is still a gradual descent toward a completion that he cannot hope to achieve – and, like Eveline, evoking the presence of the absentee ideals on his way. In the end, he seemingly voluntarily embraces a state perhaps as paralytic as Eveline’s, being only “glad of the dark stupor that would cover up his folly” (38). 

But compared with “Eveline,” in “After he Race” there is actually a modicum of hope: Eveline regresses into a non-human stasis when neither “away” nor “home” can support her existence. Jimmy and, by extension, the Irish – as Benstock (528) suggests that Joyce suggests – have a hope were they to emulate the untroubled Hungarian, Hungary at that time being in the same “mediate relation to Austria as Ireland to England” (ibid.). Villona is a free spirit, he is able to be genuinely interested in the culture of the Englishman – discovering the “beauties of the English madrigals” with “immense respect” (36) – with whom Doyle almost ends up in a fight, and is the one standing in “a shaft of grey light” announcing the break of day when Doyle is relegated to his “dark stupor.” Less concern with notoriety and money might save this hapless Irish.

McArthur suggests (as far as I am able to decipher his convoluted explication) that simony is the operative factor establishing the “position of the silent D” (252), and thus the shape of the gnomon. In “The Sisters,” according to McArthur, the D is “occupied by the relationship between the boy character-narrator and the priest” and “‘the word simony’ defines this relatedness” (ibid.). It is the precise nature of the undisclosed but thoroughly indexed – by the numerous ellipses (especially Cotter’s (3–5)), by the absolution in the dream (5), by the “it” that began when he broke “that chalice” (11) – relationship between the boy and the priest that thwarts our ability to complete the shape. We know the meaning of the word, but we are kept in the dark as to the exact nature of the simoniacs of Father Flynn’s sin.

In “Eveline,” I would argue that there is a similar, but even less obvious and more ambiguous trading of the spiritual for the temporal. Eveline is contemplating giving up the sanctity of her home, her sacred promise to her mother, and her nation, to travel with a fortune-seeker to another world, so that “people would treat her with respect” (28). In her home, she is surrounded by the twice repeated “familiar objects” (27) – more sinister if we read the modifier as a noun rather than an adjective – “from which she had never dreamed of being divided” (ibid.). When she is in the process of mentally creating this divide, we might see her effort to fill in the blank of the until now only fictional D as a gradual diagonal traversing away from the sanctity of the place she occupied before. However, and I believe this is crucial, the sanctity is so tenuous, in itself so absent and paralytic, that there is only memories, absences, and objects (and perhaps their specters) left; when she finally prays at the docks, her prayers are not answered. Her paralysis is thus a cause of the perverting initial paralysis, not of her doing, that has reduced the spiritual and the social to mere dust-gathering absences, prompting the further corrupting act of simony. Thus her diagonal traversing between two for different reasons but in equal measure undesirable positions ends with her freezing completely – as an animal, because in this state she is completely deprived of what could otherwise constitute resources for humanness.  

As already mentioned, Jimmy is already groomed by the outcome of a simoniac trade-off. In almost Biblical terms, the sins of the father visit upon this son. Thus, any kind of ties to anything that could have made him genuine are already severed, and he is, like Eveline, pining for but unable to gather the resources needed to constitute an identity, forcing him to look for it in the wrong places. Thus, external loci become his only means of evaluating a self-worth, establishing a sense of self: The reactions to his excesses, the notoriety‑by‑association, the ovations after his speech. And it is when he feels “obscurely the lack of an audience” (37) as the hours grow smaller, his final regressive collapse ensues: Without external confirmation, he is nothing.

As mentioned in the introduction to this essay, it is the word – paralysis, gnomon, simony – the boy narrator draws our attention to when presenting these concepts. This, I believe, is precisely what is at stake in Dubliners: The conceptual phylogenesis, the evolutionary history, of paralysis; how it shapes and is shaped by simony; and the configuration for their presentation, and gradual interpretive understanding, gnomon. Thus, the reading of Dubliners becomes a matter of abductive reasoning, on behalf of the reader: We are given pieces of a puzzle, and an ensemble of preliminary concepts to hang them on – but, initially, only the words, and not the full substance of the objects for their indexicality. But by their insistent indexing, they force us to assume positions regarding the reality they point to – to fill in the missing pieces of the several pictures.

Joyce called his text “a nicely polished looking-glass” (and a number of possible meanings of and associations to “nice” come to mind here), written for the Irish to have a good look at themselves (letter quoted in Wright 254). Therefore, I believe Jill Shashaty is justified in asserting that Joyce’s Dubliners is a “set of parables, [serving] as a looking-glass that … reconnects readers with ancient forms of ethical inquiry that are participatory and dialogic” (213), where the reader – Irish, or otherwise – is the site where the text is meant to elicit reactions and effectuate change.

And my participatory speculation is as follows: It is evident from Dubliners that Joyce saw the Catholic Church and the British rule as the twin sources of the Irish state of paralysis. And further, that this state of paralysis-inducing oppression was the reason for simony – spiritually, socially, and culturally: When under the yoke of foreign oppression, in the two most prominent spheres of social life, the political and the religious, a nation reverts to reductive and one-dimensional appraisal of what they should hold dear, or sells of their spiritual inheritance as a means of escape. But (i) this is just me, and no less a reflection of my self than of the text; others may speculate otherwise. And (ii), what I have just said is still an abstraction, still wanting of more content, more context, in order to become meaningful in people’s lives.

But the gnomon deserves some separate concluding remarks. Joyce had no patience with the Irish Revival, and imagined the rescue coming from the Continent rather than the past. When presenting “the word gnomon,” Joyce is explicit about its origin: the Greek mathematician Euclid, and, by association, the continent. Moreover, one is tempted to assume that Joyce not only knew, but used intentionally, the concept’s full etymological range. It could mean inspector, indicator, the pin used in a sundial (OED), a discerning index for functional absences in a text. But it is also etymologically cognate with gnostic (Online Etymology Dictionary), relating to knowledge, something that a word-buff like Joyce was likely to have known. But this a potential knowledge on behalf of the reader: With some exceptions, most stories “peters out” with characters almost as bewildered as before – in the case of Eveline and Jimmy, perhaps even more so. But to the reader, the stories could be an opportunity for gaining knowledge: the epiphanic effects, Joyce’s intention with his work. 

Thus, even though we leave many of the characters in their state of paralysis, the observant reader can, by completing the picture, gain new insight – precisely what a parable is for. A literary technique and an interpretive tool, the gnomon is our guide, whenever we follow the encouragement of the boy narrator in the frame to the cycle, and endeavor to dispel the deadly work of paralysis suffered by the Dubliners/Dubliners, by looking upon it.

Bibliography

Benstock, Bernard. “The Gnomonics of Dubliners.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 34.4 (Winter 1988): 519–39. Print.

Fairhall, James. “Big-Power Politics and Colonial Economics: The Gordon Bennett Cup and ‘After the Race’.” Dubliners. A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Margot Norris. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. 299–308. Print.

Gabler, Hans Walter. Introduction. Dubliners. A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Margot Norris. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. xv–xliii. Print.

———. The Text of Dubliners. [Editing and annotations]. Dubliners. A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Margot Norris. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. 1–194. Print.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. In Dubliners. A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Margot Norris. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. 1–194. Print.

Kerins, Frank. “‘Sounding strangely in my ears’: Foregrounded Words and Joyce's Revision of ‘The Sisters’.” Joyce Studies Annual (2008): 243–48. Print.

McArthur, Murray. “‘The Index Nothing Affirmeth’: The Semiotic Formation of a Literary Mandate in James Joyce's ‘The Sisters’.” James Joyce Quarterly 45.2 (Winter 2008): 245–62. Print.

Norris, Margot. Contexts. Dubliners. A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Margot Norris. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. 195–250. Print.

———. Preface. Dubliners. A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Margot Norris. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. ix–xiii. Print.

———. “The Perils of ‘Eveline’.” Dubliners. A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Margot Norris. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. 283–98. Print.

OED Online. “gnomon, n.”. June 2013. Oxford University Press. 13 June 2013 <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/79523?redirectedFrom=gnomon>.

OED Online. “paralysis, n.”. March 2013. Oxford University Press. 10 June 2013 <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/137499?redirectedFrom=paralysis>.

Online Etymology Dictionary. “gnomon, n.”. 13 June 2013 <http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=gnomon&allowed_in_frame=0>.

Shashaty, Jill. “Reading Dubliners Parabolically.” James Joyce Quarterly 47.2 (Winter 2010): 213–29. Print.

Wright, David G. “Interactive Stories in Dubliners.” Dubliners. A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Margot Norris. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. 253–61. Print.

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[1] All page number references to the several stories of James Joyce’s Dubliners are to the version in Dubliners. A Norton Critical Edition, edited by Margot Norris, New York: W. W. Norton & Company (2006), p. 1–194.