Joyce, Dubliners, A Painful Case Flashcards
“He wishes to live as far as possible…
“He wishes to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen… he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious”
P.34
What are the names of the books in Mr Duffy’s room?
What is the significance of each?
‘A complete Wordsworth’
- Wordsworth a central figure within the 19th century romantic literary canon. a suggestion that Duffy is a displaced member of the previous century, lost in the modern world
‘Two volumes of Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra’
Nietzsche disregards mass culture and denounces the claim of the masses to culture. Mr Duffy also seems to have a distaste for modernity
‘He found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious’
‘Death, in his opinion, had been probably due to shock and sudden failure of the heart’s action’
‘Death, in his opinion, had been probably due to shock and sudden failure of the heart’s action’
Newspaper report on Mrs Emily Sinico’s death, doctors opinion
- inaction and paralysis are reoccurring motifs through Joyce’s literature, as he has credited Dublin with being ‘the centre of paralysis’. Duffy is also skeptical of modern Dublin, of the emerging middle class and the noisiness of the city.
‘He read the paragraph…’
‘He read the paragraph over and over’
Duffy reading the newspaper discussing Mrs Sinico’s death
P.86
‘He walked quickly…’
‘He walked quickly through the November twilight’
How many years past until Mr Duffy saw Mrs Sinico’s obituary in the newspaper?
4 years
How did Mrs Sinico’s die?
‘Knocked down by the engine of the ten o’clock train’
- trains a symbol of modern times
What is the name of the doctor who pronounced Mrs Sinico’s as dead?
Dr Halpin
Why didn’t Mr Duffy write his thoughts down
What didn’t he want to do?
‘To submit to himself to the criticisms of an obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to police man’
‘He began to doubt the…’
‘He began to doubt the reality of what memory told him. He halted under a tree a let the rhythm die away’
This is classic Joycian moment, similar to the ending of After the Race. Mr Duffy ‘halts’ as if paralysed, doubts the revelation which he had - which was the sudden realisation that both he caused Mrs Sinico’s death by denying her love, and that he too would soon cease to be alive.
However, he becomes paralysed here as he questions his memory and allows that epiphany, that rhythm, to became faded and forgotten. It ‘dies away’
‘If I spoke, how could I tell her of my confused adoration’
‘If I spoke, how could I tell her of my confused abdoration’
P.20
