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2 The Dublin-Trieste Cradle Delivery The seventh story in the order of composition, “A Painful Case” is the eleventh of the fifteen stories of Dubliners. The last of the adult group, it looks both forward and backward to the stories of the thwarting of private aspirations and the disappointments in the spheres of social and public life. Written from the perspective of a concealed narrator, it employs the technique of free indirect discourse of which Joyce was by this point a sophisticated practitioner. The opening sentence, for example, must strike unsuspecting readers as a curious mixture of imprecision and posturing: “Mr James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious” (D 107.2–5). Its awkward and apparently tone-deaf repetitions (“lived . . . live . . . city . . . citizen . . . suburbs . . . Dublin”) clash with the formality of its opening (“Mr James Duffy”) and the sententiousness of its close (“mean, modern and pretentious”). This does not betray any degree of ineptitude on the narrator’s part, but rather exhibits his ability to ventriloquize his subject. Without any rhetorical cues, we overhear some of the tics of Mr. Duffy’s interior monologue, its repetitions suggesting his mental habit of regarding his fellow citizens with condescension. In the same stroke we are listening to the officious tones—drawn from the culture of print—in which (on behalf of his bank) he has become accustomed to address others. Like many of these stories, it arranges the action in a dialectical sequence of three scenes (the portrait of Duffy, the Duffy-Sinico moiety, and Duffy’s reaction to Mrs. Sinico’s death). These broad structural divisions comprise five sections, the last of which has three phases: 1: Four paragraphs. The exposition, establishing Duffy’s character and circumstances (D 107.2–109.16). 2: Eight paragraphs and one direct quotation. The dramatic development , describing the Duffy-Sinico relationship (D 109.17–112.11). 3: One paragraph. The four-year interlude (D 112.12–27). The Dublin-Trieste Cradle / 17 4: Two narrative paragraphs. Mr. Duffy’s first reaction and the newspaper report (D 112.28–115.14). 5: Seven paragraphs comprising three movements: a. Mr. Duffy’s second response, in his room (D 115.15–116.2) b. Mr. Duffy’s third response, in the pub (D 116.3–33) c. Mr. Duffy’s final response, in the Phoenix Park (D 116.34–117.34). The most obvious structural point to be made is that the final seven paragraphs complement the opening four in their treatment of Mr. Duffy as a solitary. Section 1 offers the thesis of Mr. Duffy’s purported self-sufficiency and social detachment, section 2 presents the antithesis of his foray into personal engagement (for example, we do not learn of his relationship with the Irish Socialist Party until he subsequently tells Mrs. Sinico, D 110.31–111.8), and section 5 is the synthesis of a deeper and comprehensive disengagement from “all the living and the dead.” As readers would have come to expect at this point in Dubliners, the deceptive simplicity of the story engages in a few remarkable narrative tricks. Whereas sections 1 and 2 follow a “normal” narrative sequence (building from the introduction of the characters into a sequential narrative), after recounting the rupture of the Duffy-Sinico relationship, the narrative changes pace and order. First, there is the “fast-forward” interlude, which in fifteen lines moves through a four-year period (D 112.12–27). Next comes section 4, which reverses the time sequence: we read Mr. Duffy’s reaction to a newspaper article of which we have not yet been apprised. Part 5 slows the action to provide for a searching dilation of Mr. Duffy’s thoughts and feelings before the pace of the narrative comes to a complete stop. At this point, the most general observation is that Joyce’s favorite physical exercise—learned from his father and shared with his brother Stanislaus—informs the relationship between the form and content of “A Painful Case”: walking. The Joyces were inveterate long-distance walkers: John Stanislaus in the course of his duties as collector of rates, and the brothers on weekend excursions, which ranged the whole city of Dublin, its suburbs, and nearby Wicklow mountains. The appetite for and intimacy with Dublin topography that Joyce acquired from his father made this propertyless...

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