In this famous passage from “The Sisters,” the first story in Joyce's Dubliners, the child-narrator gazes upward to the window to figure out if Father Flynn, the paralytic priest, is dead. But instead of seeing through this window, the child's gaze is obstructed by the “darkened blind.” This blind transforms the window into a surface to be read, as opposed to a transparent portal to the death-chamber. That the boy is searching for a sign of death, rather than the living presence of the syphilitic priest, implicates the blind in the ascendancy of signs, and the sign in the downfall of father-figures.

In Chapter 3 I argued that a central blindness organizes Strether's visual field, both obstructing and enhancing his perception of Chad's love affair: obstructing, in the sense that Strether's idealization of the romance conceals its carnal element; enhancing, in the sense that Strether alone appreciates the moral benefits of the liaison.