One night, when speaking of the individual's insurmountable loneliness, she takes his hand passionately and presses it to her cheek. Mr Duffy is surprised; she has misunderstood. He does not see her for a week, and then sends word asking to meet her. They meet in a cake shop near the Parkgate, and then walk in Phoenix Park for three hours. They agree that they cannot meet again. His life continues in its orderly fashion. He reads some Nietzsche and avoids concerts, for fear of seeing her.
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.
“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 neighbourhood he chose for its distance from the hustle and bustle of Dublin. Colours 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.
“A Painful Case” is unusual among The Dubliners stories in that the protagonist undeniably comes to a consciousness that his life has changed after the usual paralysis of the rest of the characters. The change, of course, is merely one of perspective: in the beginning he is a solitary and comfortable in that self-diagnosis; at the end he “felt that he was alone”, an “outcast from life’s feast”. Nor is it surprising that he should act so strongly as to alter permanently his self-perception, for – in the context of the other stories – a truly dramatic event, the death of a friend, has occurred. It makes the reader wonder whether Joyce may have been dissatisfied with the story as it contains material that might produce either tragedy or melodrama. It is as if all the protective, distancing irony that Joyce so assiduously musters must struggle against Mr Duffy’s painful insistence that Mrs. Sinico’s death has genuine and powerful resonance in his own life. The shcock Duffy experiences and the depth of emotional indulgence into which he sinks suggest that no one is so sentimental as the lapsed ironist.
The reader grows to know Duffy as much through the narrative in which he participates as through explicit comments, thought and actions. Indeed, Joyce foregrounds Duffy’s dialogic participation in places, suggesting Duffy may be his own narrator. One such instance is the self-reflexive sentence, “He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense.” Another is his curiously disembodied observation during one of his discussions with Mrs. Sinico, “he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul’s incurable loneliness.” At least during the first half of the story, Duffy remains little more than a voice. He is a man made of words, who confuses them with substance and nourishment. Inside his desk is the translation of Michael Kramer and the collection of his sententiae he has entitled Bile Beans, but when the desk is lifted one is likely to smell “an over-ripe apple which might have been left there and forgotten.” He is in the habit of “reading the evening paper for dessert.” Words compose him; He eats them, pretends to artistic expression through them, and offers them to Mrs. Sinico in lieu of passion. Although their limbs never entangle, “little by little he entangled his thoughts with hers.”
The patterns of Duffy’s inner narration are those so often reflected in the story’s narration: enumeration and inventory, classical balance and antithesis, analysis, neat causal connection, passive-voice construction. One of the sentences he inscribes in his book displays all these: “Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.” In the story’s narration, the elements are distributed, so as to avoid the extreme stylisation of Duffy’s writing. Enumeration is evident in the description of his room: “a black iron bedstead, an iron washstand, four cane chairs, a clothes-rack, a coal-scuttle, a fender and irons and a square table on which lay a double-desk” Even his personal lacks are described in terms of satisfying balance: “He had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed”. Sometimes the urge to rhetorical balance obtains even when the items balanced differ so grossly that the effect is strikingly ironic. The observation, “His father died: the junior partner of his bank retired” is so strikingly sterile that the effect is comical. Analytical sentences are interjected even when the thing analysed seems trivial or absurd, as when the narrator notes that the books in his library are “arranged from below upwards according to bulk.” Similarly, sentences of causal analysis give the appearance of closing off a subject even when on inspection they raise as many questions as they answer: “Mr James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious.” But perhaps the most notable characteristic of the first paragraph, in which the majority of these sentences occur, is that their subject is curiously absent. “Writing materials were always on the desk. In the desk lay a manuscript translation of Hauptmann’s Michael Kramer, the stage directions of which were written in purple ink, and a little sheaf of papers held together with a brass pin. In these sheets a sentence was inscribed from time to time and, in an ironical moment, the headline of an advertisement for Bile Beans had been pasted on to the first sheet. On lifting the lid of the desk a faint fragrance escaped.” The reader cannot fail to notice that in the description of his most intimate activity Duffy is not present. He haunts the syntax of the sentences like a passive ghost, never appearing even as pronoun. Like a déclassé Deity, he is the absent cause of his own creation.
