James Joyce, Dubliners
... realization makes Gabriel cry and realize something inside him, "He had never felt like that himself toward any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love." (Dubliners, page 224) This idea makes Gabriel think about life in general and how people die. This new feeling inside of him makes him realize one more thing, "The time has come for him to set on his journey westward." (Dubliners, page 225) Alike to Gabriel, Mr. Duffy, in the A Painful Case, has as big of an arrogance as Gabriel, but never does he realize that he was wrong. Mr. Duffy is a person who tries to separate himself from the rest of the society and just be all to himself. "Mr. James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious." (Dubliners, page 104) Mr. Duffy has been a cashier in the privet bank for many years. In the afford to keep his life as simple as one can, his daily ritual consists of him taking a tram from Chapelizod to get to work in Dublin, at midday he went to Dan Burke's and took his lunch "…a bottle of lager beer and a small trayful of arrowroot biscuits." (Dubliners, page 104) At four o'clock every day he would stop working and he would dine in an eating-house in George's Street "where he felt himself safe from the society of Dublin's gilded youth and where there was a certain plain honesty in the bill of fare." (Dubliners, page 104) He had neither companion nor friends, church nor creed. Mr. Duffy's spiritual life consisted without any communications with others, the only exceptions to that was seeing his parents on Christmas and burying them when they died. "He performed these two social duties for old dignity sake but concealed nothing further to the conversation which regulate the civic life." (Dubliners, page 105) His experience of self-centrism and exclusionism from social ranks ended once when he met Mrs. Sinico in the Rotunda. Mrs. Sinico was a wife of a merchant boat captain who was plying between Dublin and Holland, and they had one baby girl. The meetings between Mr. Duffy and Mrs. Sinico in the beginning were accidental, but later on Mr. Duffy had courage to make an appointment with her, which she kept. They would always meet in the evenings and choose the most quiet quarters. Mr. Duffy forced Mrs. Sinico to ask him inside her house, and Captain Sinico was more then welcomed to accept him because he was thinking that his daughters hand was in question. "He had dismissed his wife so sincerely from his gallery of pleasures that he did not suspect that anyone else would take an interest in her." (Dubliners, page 106) As Mr. Sinico was often away to the sea and the daughter out, Mr. Duffy had many opportunities to enjoy Mrs. Sinico's company. "Neither he nor she had had any such adventure before and neither was conscious of any incongruity. Little by little he entangled his thoughts with hers. He lent her books, provided her with ideas, shared his intellectual life with her. She listened to all." (Dubliners, page 106) As the meetings between Mr. Duffy and Mrs. Sinico continued, Mr. Duffy thought "…in her eyes he would ascend to an angelical statue; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognized as his own, insisting on the soul's incurable loneliness." (Dubliners, page 107) With Mr. Duffy's influence they agreed to "…break off their intercourse; every bond, he said, is a bond of sorrow." (Dubliners, page 108) Couple of months later after the break up Mr. Duffy wrote "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." (Dubliners, page 108) Four years later Mr. Duffy read an article...