Narrative Structure & Tragedy: A Look at James Joyce’s “A Painful Case”

James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” appears to be among the more conventional of the stories in Dubliners. Stream of consciousness is used sparingly, the plot is well-defined (in comparison to stories like “The Sisters,” where events are left ambiguous) and the third-person narrator often interjects the text with authorial statements. However, the story raises unanswered questions through Joyce’s use of atypical narrative structure. While stories traditionally are driven by a character seeking to accomplish some goal, Mr Duffy in “A Painful Case” takes very few actions and his goals are unclear. This approach to narrative structure serves to illustrate Mr Duffy’s character and develop modernist themes.

“A Painful Case” relates the story of Mr Duffy, a solitary man who briefly has an affair with Mrs Sinico, a married woman. Uncomfortable with the way the romance breaks down his self-imposed isolation, he breaks the affair off. Years later, he reads of her death in the newspaper, and blames himself both for her death and for the loss of the only person he ever truly got along with.

The story is most similar in structure to a Greek tragedy, such as Sophokles’s Oedipus Rex or Oedipus at Colonus, where the actions of the characters have no bearing on their fate. There is hamartia, or a tragic flaw, in this case Mr Duffy’s disdain for others, leading to his self-imposed isolation, as well as  anagnorisis, or the moment of realization when Mr Duffy reads the newspaper article. However, whereas Greek tragedies have the protagonist’s downfall being inevitable, and often predestined, the death of Mrs Sinico was a freak accident (or possibly a suicide)—her “injuries were not sufficient to have caused death in a normal person.”¹ This breaking with causality functions to highlight the paralysis Mr Duffy felt, a modernist theme that is found throughout Dubliners.

The story ends with a somewhat atypical Joycian epiphany, that is, “a sudden spiritual transformation” that Joyce “believed that it was for a man of letters to record…with extreme care, seeing that they are the most delicate…of moments.”² These epiphanies are often of a negative nature, instead of the joyful moment of knowledge that the word “epiphany” implies. However, “A Painful Case” continues past the initial moment of knowledge, when Mr Duffy learns of the death of Mrs Sinico, and instead ends on Mr Duffy realizing how alone he really is. The moment of anagnorisis is different from Mr Duffy’s final epiphany.

The spare use of stream of consciousness and free indirect speech serves to highlight the contrast between Mr Duffy’s self-image and how Mr Duffy actually is. While the narrator calls him “saturnine,” without “companions nor friends,” and with a life that was “an adventureless tale,” he regards himself as a great intellectual and looks down with scorn on the “obtuse middle class.”³ Mr Duffy is so absorbed in his own inner life that a story written from his perspective would contain very little but “the orderliness of his mind.”⁴ Even from the distant perspective employed, there are very few details shared about Mrs Sinico’s personality. Joyce writes that “she gave out some fact of her own life,” but never what that fact is.⁵ Mr Duffy is unable to treat Mrs Simico as anything other than a reflection of himself.

Mrs Simico, however, enjoys listening to him, even encourages him to “write out his thoughts.”⁶ He recognizes this and appreciates it–he catches “himself listening to the sound of his own voice” and feels like “in her eyes he would ascend to an angelical stature.”⁷ Even so, he feels that she will never truly be able to understand him, “insisting on the soul’s incurable loneliness.”⁸ It is only at the end of the story that he is capable of viewing her with empathy–not only understanding “how lonely her life must have been” but also understanding that “[his] life would be lonely too” without her.⁹ Mr Duffy has always preferred a solitary life, but the story ends with the imagined presence of Mrs Simico leaving him, and him feeling, for perhaps the first time in his life, alone.

The protagonist of “A Painful Case” is in many ways a modernist (or perhaps a caricature of a modernist) with his intellectual interests, dissatisfaction with politics, and general feeling of alienation. Another aspect of Mr Duffy’s personality that relates to modernism is his dislike for religion. Joyce criticizes Catholicism in many of his works, including in this story. While Mr Duffy “had neither…church nor creed,” he refers to his meetings with Mrs Sinico as confessional in nature.¹⁰ He is even dismayed when Mrs Sinico wishes to make their relationship more physical in nature.

He is generally disconnected from the physical world, and also seems to view Mrs Sinico as an intellectual, perhaps even spiritual, companion. Mr Duffy calls her “almost maternal,” and “[his] soul’s companion.”¹¹ In one of the more confusing passages in the text, he says that “she degraded herself; she had degraded him. He saw the squalid tract of her vice, miserable and malodorous.”¹² Another religious image occurs when he muses that “it revolted him to think that he had ever spoken to her of what he held sacred.”¹³ Mr Duffy’s viewing Mrs Sinico as a substitute for the comforts of religion allows Joyce an opportunity to elaborate on his dissatisfaction for the institution.  

Mr Duffy comes to a modernist conclusion about the world before the story even began. He recognizes his own alienation and loneliness, but it takes four years and a tragedy for him to recognize this as a failing, not something to be romanticized. The narratorial distance from the protagonist highlights Mr Duffy’s own experience of living “at a little distance from his body” and composing “from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person.”¹⁴ Mr Duffy is at once an absurd modernist caricature and a static, paralyzed one. Joyce demonstrates this not only in the content of the text but also through his atypical usage of Greek tragedy structure and his own conception of epiphanies.

NOTES

¹ James Joyce. Dubliners. With introduction and notes by Terence Brown (1993). (New York: Penguin Books, 1914), 110.
² Brown, xxxiv.
³ Joyce, 104-7.
⁴ Joyce, 108.
⁵ Joyce, 106.
⁶ Joyce, 107.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ Ibid.
⁹ Joyce, 112-3.
¹⁰ Joyce, 105.
¹¹ Joyce, 106-11.
¹² Joyce, 111.
¹³ Ibid.
¹⁴ Joyce, 104.