“A Painful Case”

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He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the
Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled
him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been
outcast from life’s feast.

(See Important Quotations Explained)

Summary

A predictable, unadventurous bank cashier, Mr. Duffy lives an existence of

prudence and organization. He keeps a tidy house, eats at the same
restaurants, and makes the same daily commute. Occasionally, Mr. Duffy
allows himself an evening out at the opera or a concert, and on one of these
evenings he engages in a conversation with another audience member, Mrs.
Sinico, a striking woman who sits with her young daughter. Subsequent
encounters ensue at other concerts, and on the third occasion Mr. Duffy sets
up a time and day to meet purposely with her. Because Mrs. Sinico is married
and her husband, a captain of a merchant ship, is constantly away from home,
Mr. Duffy feels slightly uncomfortable with the clandestine nature of the
relationship. Nevertheless, they continue to meet, always at her home.

Their discussions revolve around their similar intellectual interests, including

books, political theories, and music, and with each meeting they draw more
closely together. Such sharing gradually softens Mr. Duffy’s hard character.
However, during one of their meetings, Mrs. Sinico takes Mr. Duffy’s hand and
places it on her cheek, which deeply bothers Mr. Duffy. He feels Mrs. Sinico
has misinterpreted his acts of companionship as sexual advances. In
response, he cuts off the relationship, first by stopping his visits and then by
arranging a final meeting at a cake shop in Dublin, deliberately not at Mrs.
Sinico’s home. They agree to end the relationship, but Mrs. Sinico’s emotional
presence at this meeting suggests she is less willing to say goodbye than is
Mr. Duffy.

Four years pass. One evening, during his usual dinner in town, Mr. Duffy
reads a newspaper article that surprises him enough to halt his eating and
hurry home. There, he reads the article, entitled “A Painful Case,” once more.
The article recounts the death of Mrs. Sinico, who was hit by a train at a
station in Dublin the previous evening. Witness accounts and the coroner’s
inquest deem that the death was caused by shock or heart failure, and not
injuries from the train itself. The article also explains that Mrs. Sinico was a
drinker and had become increasingly detached from her husband over the
past two years. The article concludes with the statement that no one is
responsible for her death.

The news of Mrs. Sinico’s death at first angers but later saddens Mr. Duffy.
Perhaps suspecting suicide or weakness in character, he feels disgusted by
her death and by his connection to her life. Disturbed, he leaves his home to
visit a local pub, where he drinks and remembers his relationship with her. His
anger begins to subside, and by the time he leaves to walk home, he feels
deep remorse, mainly for ending the relationship and losing the potential for
companionship it offered. Upon seeing a pair of lovers in the park by his
home, Mr. Duffy realizes that he gave up the only love he’d experienced in
life. He feels utterly alone.
Analysis

Because Mr. Duffy cannot tolerate unpredictability, his relationship with Mrs.
Sinico is a disruption to his orderly life that he knows he must eliminate, but
which he ultimately fails to control. Mrs. Sinico awakens welcome new
emotions in Mr. Duffy, but when she makes an intimate gesture he reacts with
surprise and rigidity. Though all along he spoke of the impossibility of sharing
one’s self and the inevitability of loneliness, Mrs. Sinico’s gesture suggests
that another truth exists, and this truth frightens Mr. Duffy. Accepting Mrs.
Sinico’s offered truth, which opens the possibility for love and deep feeling,
would mean changing his life entirely, which Mr. Duffy cannot do. He resumes
his solitary life with some relief. When Mr. Duffy reads of Mrs. Sinico’s death
four years later, he reacts with shock and disgust, as he did when Mrs. Sinico
touched his hand. Mrs. Sinico’s dramatic demise points to a depth of feeling
she possessed that Mr. Duffy will never understand or share, and it provides
Mr. Duffy with an epiphany as he walks home. He realizes that his concern
with order and rectitude shut her out of his life, and that this concern excludes
him from living fully. Like other characters in Dubliners who experience
epiphanies, Mr. Duffy is not inspired to begin a new phase in his life, but
instead he bitterly accepts his loneliness.
“A Painful Case” concludes where it begins, with Mr. Duffy alone. This
narrative circle mimics the many routines that comprise Mr. Duffy’s life and
deny him true companionship. The story opens with a detailed depiction of Mr.
Duffy’s unadorned home in a neighborhood he chose for its distance from the
hustle and bustle of Dublin. Colors are limited and walls are bare in Mr.
Duffy’s house, and disorder, spontaneity, and passion are unwelcome. As
such, Mr. Duffy’s house serves as a microcosm of his soul. His regulatory
impulses make each day the same as the next. Such deadening
repetitiveness ultimately brings Mr. Duffy death in life: the death of someone
who once stirred his longings to be with others. In life, Mrs. Sinico invigorated
Mr. Duffy’s routine and, through her intimacy, came close to warming his cold
heart. Only in death, however, does she succeed in revealing his cycle of
solitude to him. The tragedy of this story is threefold. First, Mr. Duffy must face
a dramatic death before he can rethink his lifestyle and outlook. Second,
acknowledging the problems in his lifestyle makes him realize his culpability:
Mrs. Sinico died of a broken heart that he caused. Third, and perhaps most
tragic, Mr. Duffy will not change the life he has created for himself. He is
paralyzed, despite his revelations and his guilt.

Joyce’s choice of symbolic names in “A Painful Case” articulates the story’s

somber subject of thwarted love and loneliness. Duffyderives from the Irish
word for dark, suggesting the grim, solemn mood in which the story unfolds
and Mr. Duffy lives. The suburb in which Mr. Duffy resides, Chapelizod, takes
its name from the French, Chapel d’Iseult. Iseult is half of the famed set of
lovers, Tristan and Iseult, whose doomed affair ranks as one of the most
iconic love stories in literature and music. This name’s appearance in the story
as Mr. Duffy’s home neighborhood, which he purposely chose in order to
distance himself from Dublin’s hustle and bustle and which is the starting point
for his daily routine, connects the unrequited love and death of Mrs. Sinico
with Mr. Duffy’s restrained existence.

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Summary and Analysis A Painful Case

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Summary
A solitary, effete bank cashier named James Duffy becomes acquainted with a woman
named Mrs. Sinico at a Dublin concert. They meet regularly to discuss art and ideas,
first at her house (with the full knowledge of her husband, Captain Sinico), and then at
her cottage outside the city, where they grow close both intellectually and emotionally.
When Mrs. Sinico reaches for Duffy's hand, however, he insists that they stop seeing
one another. Four years later, Duffy reads in the newspaper about Mrs. Sinico's death,
apparently by suicide. At first he feels revolted, ashamed that he ever considered her a
peer. Then Duffy begins to feel guilty: Did his rejection of her result in Mrs. Sinico's
suicide? Finally he identifies and empathizes with Mrs. Sinico, realizing that her
aloneness mirrored his own — and that he is now more alone than ever.

Analysis

Like "Eveline," this is a story of missed opportunity, and true to its title, "A Painful Case"
is perhaps even more agonizing to read than that earlier selection. Just as Eveline's
fiancé presents her the chance to escape Ireland, Duffy is allowed a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity to connect with a kindred soul, Mrs. Sinico. Tragically (and typically), both
are paralyzed: Eveline by guilt and fear, and Duffy by fear as well — fear that his
fanatically orderly world will be thrown into disarray by shared passion. As in the earlier
story, Joyce seemingly intends the reader to believe that such an opportunity will never
come again.

In some ways, "A Painful Case" is the most sophisticated and complex Dubliners story
yet, as it achieves its powerful effect through a deft combination of storytelling
techniques and symbolism. As in "A Little Cloud," "Counterparts," and "Clay," Joyce
employs the limited third-person point-of-view, allowing access to his protagonist's
thoughts and feelings while keeping the reader distant enough from the main character
to realize the errors of the protagonist's ways before the protagonist does. (The reader
knows, for example, that it is a terrible mistake for Duffy to terminate his relationship
with Mrs. Sinico.)

Unlike the stories "A Little Cloud," "Counterparts," and "Clay," however, "A Painful
Case" includes information that was initially beyond the perspective of its protagonist.
Because he does not speak with Mrs. Sinico for the four years immediately prior to her
suicide, Duffy has no way of following what goes on in her life during that time, nor does
the reader. Joyce includes the newspaper article documenting her death and the
inquest that follows it, and the article retroactively shares Mrs. Sinico's life since of the
past four years with Duffy and the reader. The author's use of this document to tell his
story is an inventive way of surmounting his limited point-of-view strategy without
violating its restrictive rules.

Joyce characterizes Duffy by means of his possessions: the picture-free walls of his
uncarpeted room, and the fastidious, eminently practical manner in which he has
arranged his books (by weight!). Though Joyce reveals that Duffy "abhorred anything
which betokened physical or mental disorder," he doesn't really have to because he has
taken care to dramatize Duffy's character. The reader can generalize about the man
Duffy is based on the evidence presented.

The colors yellow and brown (which Joyce uses to indicate paralysis and decay) are
everywhere in "A Painful Case" — in Duffy's uncarpeted floor, his hazel walking stick,
and the beer and biscuits he eats for lunch. Even Duffy's face is brown: "the brown tint
of the Dublin streets." An apple rots in his desk (that is, turns yellow and then brown), a
symbol of Duffy's own decaying possibilities. The newspaper that announces Mrs.
Sinico's suicide is buff in color, yellowish brown. The use of these colors by Joyce to
symbolize decay and paralysis is consistent both within individual stories and across the
collection as a whole. It thereby links the stories of Dublinerstogether, reiterating the
common lot of the book's many disparate characters.

Glossary

Bile Beans a popular patent medicine in Ireland during Joyce's day.

the Rotunda a group of buildings on Rutland Square, one of which is a concert hall.

astrakhan a wool fabric with a pile cut and curled to look like a loosely curled fur made
from the pelt of very young lambs originally bred near Astrakhan, a city and port in
southwest Russia.

Earlsfort Terrace the location of the Dublin International Exhibition Building, a concert
venue at the time this story takes place.

Leghorn a seaport in Tuscany, western Italy, on the Ligurian Sea (The Italian name is
Livorno.)

Parkgate the main entrance to Phoenix Park, the large public park in northwest Dublin.

the buff Mail the Dublin Evening Mail, which was printed on buff (brownish-yellow)
paper.

reefer an overcoat; a short, thick, double-breasted coat in the style of a seaman's

jacket.

the prayers Secret prayers in the Roman Catholic mass between the Offertory and the
Preface, read silently or quietly by the priest.

Sidney Parade a train station on Sidney Parade Avenue, in the village of Merion,
southeast of Dublin.

Leoville apparently the name of the house in which the Sinicos lived.

a league a temperance association; its members would have pledged to avoid alcohol.
the Herald the Dublin Evening Herald.