Joyce seeks to make his story mysterious and open to interpretation. The key element he employs to achieve this effect is his careful choice of where the reader is placed while engaged in the story, otherwise known as the point-of-view. In the story, we are exposed to more emotional evidence than factual content and are also, for the entirety of the story, placed into the mind of a young boy. In, “The Sisters,” James Joyce establishes the point-of-view of the young boy to introduce doubt, mystery and contrasting evidence into the story in a grand effort to inspire a mental battle within the reader's mind as to the goodness or evilness of Father Flynn. At the beginning of the story, we along with the young boy are thrust into conversation with a collection of adults including the boy's uncle, aunt and Old Cotter, who can be assumed to be a family friend of some sort. However, we are not really in the conversation but just observing the conversation, as the boy is much too young to contribute any worthwhile information in the company of the adults and thus merely listens without speaking to any significant degree. This is the first method that Joyce uses to cast a shroud of doubt over the story. By putting our character, a boy, in the company of adults, our character cannot make clarifications or ask enlightening questions due to his considerably lower social standing and thus we are prevented from coming upon potentially insightful details about Father Flynn's life. The adults may also feel uncomfortable discussing certain topics in the presence of a child, a real possibility that can be explained by the many unfinished, trail-off sentences in the story that come from both Old Cotter and the young boy's aunts. In place of any factual evidence we could potentially glean through the conversation, we are instead in this opening sequence of the story given emotional evidence from both Old Cotter and the young boy himself. We listen to Old Cotter express doubt about Father Flynn when he says, “There was something queer... there was something uncanny about him,” “I think it was one of those... peculiar cases,” (1) and, “I wouldn't like children of mine... to have too much to say to a man like that.” (2) Old Cotter doesn't specify exactly what was odd or bad about Father Flynn in any of his revelations, but merely expresses the vague sentiments that he did not like Father Flynn and that ki