Group 3: A Painful Case - James Joyce

Title: A Painful Case

Author: James Joyce

Year of Publication: 1917  (Written  in July 1905)

Setting:

 Mr. Duffy, who works in a bank, lives a dull life in Dublin, maintains a routine to opera and meets Mrs. Sinico, who lives a fast and tragic romance that results in the death of Mrs. Sinico.

Characters: 

* main characters: 

Mr James Duffy: is a cashier at a private bank, has no friend and is a very correct and reserved.

Mrs Emily Sinico: She is married, has a daughter and she has a bad relationship with her husband and ends up falling for Mr Duffy. 

* character secondary:

The husband of Mr Sinico: is a capitan of a merchant ship, and spends most of this time away from home.

Mary: daughter of Mrs Sinico which appears in the beginning in concert with her mother, and at the end when her mother dies.

Plot summary :

James Duffy lives in a distant suburb of Dublin called  Chapelizod because he  is a reserved and methodical man who does not like the city.   He is a very organized person, works in a bank and does the same things every day, like reading the newspaper at the same restaurant every evening, and walks home .He plays the piano at night and sometimes goes out to hear classical music. He is not the kind of person who cares about family. One of these evenings, he  meets  Mrs. Sinico, a woman who sits with her young daughter at the audience of the Opera house. Since this day, they start to talk and then, Mr Duffy invites her over to his house. This was the first of many meetings. Their discussions are around their similar intellectual interests, including books, political theories, and music, and with each meeting they draw more closely together. However, Mrs. Sinico is married with Captain Sinico, a Captain of a merchant ship, and he is constantly away from home.  Even knowing that, Mr. Duffy keeps going to her house .The meetings come to an end one night when Mrs Sinico reacts to one of his phrases differently: she "caught up his hand passionately and pressed it to her cheek". Mr Duffy doesn't visit for a week and then decides to have a last meeting with her in public so he could avoid any kind of problem. She sends him back his books and they stop seeing each other.  After that, he's back to his old routine of going to work and walking home until one night when he reads about Mrs Sinico's death in the newspaper. She had been "knocked down by the engine of the ten o'clock slow train from Kingstown, thereby sustaining injuries of the head and right side which led to her death.The newspaper article goes on to explain that the real blame lay with Mrs Sinico and not with the train. She was out "late at night" and had "been in the habit of crossing the lines  from platform to platform. Her daughter even testifies that she'd recently started drinking a lot. Mr Duffy's first reaction is disgust: "she had degraded him." He regrets ever getting involved, wondering, "Was it possible he had deceived himself so utterly about her?". Then he thinks about it more and, as he goes in to get a drink at a pub, he remembers the whole relationship. That's when he starts to feel remorse. "He began to feel ill at ease" and realizes how "lonely" she must have been without him, and that he's to blame for his own loneliness. He retraces the steps of their old walks and "felt his moral nature falling to pieces" because he realizes that he had "sentenced her to death" He doesn't make it home by the end of the story, but stops walking at one point and is perfectly still: "He began to doubt the reality of what memory told him.He halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to die away. He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing .He felt that he was alone".

Symbols :

 The theater, the house, the windows, the twilight and nighttime, dark and black, the food.
These symbols consist of the thriller of these young men to reflect on their lives evoke the anticipation of events or meetings that are bound to happen. 
The dark scenario symbolize the half-life or intermediate state the characters occupy Dubliners, both physically and emotionally, suggesting a mixture of life and death marking each story. In this state, life can exist and continue, but the darkness makes the experiences of Dubliners dire and convicted.

 In most cases food serves as a reminder of both the threatening dullness of routine and the joys and difficulties of marriage. The meal symbolize the experiences of the character and its restrictions.

Epiphanies:

The story´s  climax is where we can also see the protagonist’s epiphany. After receiving the news about the death of Mrs. Sinico, Mr. Duff out to drink and think about what he read in the newspaper, to return home and walk through Phoenix Park, which was also his last meeting with Mrs. Sinico, Mr. Duff observed a couple in the park and recalls of his relationship with Mrs. Sinico, and how hard it was for her after he had gone, the thought is so strong that he comes to feel her presence beside him, but then he realizes that your life has been very lonely and difficult and he lost someone who loved him and who brought happiness, He is completely alone again.