This paper applies a text-linguistic and discourse-theoretical framework to James Joyce’s short story “The Sisters,” the opening story of Dubliners. The framework treats a text as the linguistic dimension of discourse and relies on the categories of signifier, denotatum, cohesion, genre, and intersubjectivity. The analysis argues that the story is organized around one sustained linguistic operation: it deliberately keeps the link between signifier and denotatum open, so that the two never fully align. This device is reinforced by the fracturing of cohesion in dialogue, where speech breaks off into silence and euphemism. It is brought into sharpest relief by a single embedded fragment of journalistic discourse, the formal death notice pinned to the priest’s door, whose denotative completeness contrasts with the evasive oral discourse of the surrounding community. The paper also considers the story’s genre status as artistic discourse, the narrating subject’s inadequacy as an interpreter of his own experience, and the story’s embeddedness in the religious-cultural vocabulary of Catholic Dublin. It concludes that Joyce’s text does not merely represent a death; its form demonstrates that language cannot fully express reality, which supports the view that texts are open-ended and lack a single settled meaning.