Kicsk 1 Comparison of Two Versions of James Joyces Short Story, the Sisters After reading the earlier, then

the latter version of the Sisters, one can realize that the basic situation, that is the death of James Flynn, and some basic motifs, like the beautiful images of light and shades are the same, yet slight differences concerning fluency, focus, and the mode of telling the story can be discovered. The latter version of Sisters seems to be much more fluent than the earlier one. The story flows more airily due to long and structured sentences contrary to the shorter utterances of the other text that make the reading and comprehension a bit jerky. However, the usage of this latter technique has not only negative results, as it makes the story itself clearer and not so complicated for the reader by providing him/her solely and what is perhaps more important directly with all the relevant pieces of information that are essential to find the focus itself. Therefore, the focus of the two versions is also ambiguous, although for the first sight, or rather reading, it may seem evident that both are focusing on the death of James Flynn and on how does this sorrowful event affects his environment, especially the life of his daughters and their aunt. The point where I feel some deviation is the presentation of this event. I feel myself much closer to the events, to the mourning, and to the misery of the characters in the first version as my impression is that the whole story is centred around its one and only focus, and it is the death of that person. The other version, however, after introducing the story with the fact of death, places other elements on the focus henceforward with detailed and meaningful description of other events and people, even during the conversations presented. This impression may come from another slight difference between the stories, and this is the mode of story-telling. The early version narrates the events as a story, while the other version prefers active sentences, and shows the characters much more in action. Furthermore, in the early version the events are narrated from the past: My aunt [...] never went into the shop without bringing him some High Toast; and he used to take the packet of snuff from her

Kicsk 2 hands [...] he used to sit in that stuffy room [...] while Nannie [...] read out the newspaper to him. (246) The narration of the other version comes from the present: Had he not been dead I would have gone into the little dark room to find him sitting in his armchair by the fire [...] My aunt would have given me a packet of High Toast for him [...]. (12) The beautiful images of lights, shades and colours are similar in both short stories, just like their roles. Joyce exploits the bloom and richness of this image to a hundred percent, and writes beautifully about it: dusky golden light amid which candles looked like pale thin flames. (14) This description is exactly the same in both literary pieces, which shows the importance and perfection of these images. The two versions of the short story share the same basic idea and concept with slight modifications, which come mainly from the different techniques used by Joyce. It has its effects on the focus and fluency of the story, too, yet Joyce has not altered his method of using beautiful images of light. They are even repeated word by word in the second version of the story.