story. In this paper, I argue that because religion played such a significant role in the lives of the middle class, it was something that many citizens felt was suffocating and from which it was impossible to get away. Each of the three childhood stories uses religion to keep the character captive. In The Sisters, Father Flynn plays an important role in making the narrator feel like a prisoner. Mr. Cotter’s comment that “… a young lad should run about and play with young lads of his own age…” suggests that the narrator has spent a great deal of time with the priest. The boy feels the need to get away from him, but this proves to be impossible. When the boy ran away into his “pleasant and vicious region”, the priest was still there—haunting him. In fact, even before the narrator is thoroughly convinced that the priest is dead, he is worried that Father Flynn will haunt him: “In the dark of my room I imagined that I saw again the heavy grey face of the paralytic. I drew the blankets over my head and tried to think of Christmas”. These passages convey the idea that the boy was afraid of the priest and felt somewhat freed by his death. This is further proven when the boy, after having seen the card announcing the death of the priest, thinks it “strange that neither he nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and he even felt annoyed at discovering in himself a sensation of freedom as if he had been freed from something by Father Flynn’s death”. This feeling of freedom suggests that the boy understood that he was a captive of Father Flynn, and thereby, also a captive of the church. With the Father’s death, perhaps the death of his captivity came as well. The idea of religious bondage can be seen in An Encounter by examining the relationship between the boys and Father Butler. When Leo Dillion is caught reading The Apache Ch

Some topics in this essay:
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