Dots Marks the Spot:Textual Gaps in 'Dubliners'

It is well established that various objects, like candles and cork screws, often go missing in Dubliners and that in the stories absence becomes a conspicuous form of presence. Specific examples of this phenomenon have been pointed out by John Gordon in a helpful discussion of absence in Dubliners} Margot Norris demonstrates that readers of Joyce's text frequently need to supply ingredients which the stories themselves withhold,2 Moreover, analogous things tend to disappear?or fail to appear?in pairs or groups of stories, rein forcing the picture not only of deprivation but of a society in which certain forms of deprivation have become endemic. Apart from physical objects, various verbal entities regularly van ish from the text of Dubliners. For example, direct speech acts are often missing, suppressed, or truncated. We never hear a word from Father Flynn, who is paralyzed before the first story opens or from Michael Furey, who died long before the last one gets underway Tom Kernan, the central character in the story originally conceived as the collection's conclusion, begins it by biting off a portion of his tongue, thus foreshortening his verbal gestures, and even after a par tial recovery from his injury he remains surrounded by people more articulate than he is. Central characters in several stories have little or