The unnamed character who looks back on his boyhood while narrating "The Sisters" is a figure of central importance to Dubliners as a whole. He is the first character in the book who the reader gets to know from the inside. He serves as a sort of template for the main characters of the two stories that follow (and perhaps that of "The Dead," as well), and he makes concrete the collection's major themes by embodying opposite qualities.
The boy is a natural character with which to begin a book because he possesses so many qualities attractive to readers. First, he is sensitive — sensitive enough to experience a wide range of feelings in spite of his tender age, including apparently contradictory combinations like fear and longing (at the end of the story's first paragraph), anger and puzzlement (while falling asleep), and, especially, "a sensation of freedom" in response to his mentor's passing that surprises him and us. "I found it strange," the narrator says, "that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood."
Second, he is intelligent — and not merely in the conventional sense of the word. Sure, he is brainy enough to absorb much of the arcane information shared with him by the priest. (It makes sense that he has grown into the articulate storyteller who shares the tale of Father Flynn's influence upon him.) But the protagonist of "The Sisters" also possesses an intuitive understanding of how other human beings feel, think, and act — emotional intelligence, you might call it.
