The ending of ‘A Painful Case’ is a slap in the face: Mr. Duffy is already a mere memory, gradually
becoming detached from the reality of sound, even of noise:
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: the night was perfectly silent.
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He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.
The narrative cuts abruptly. The repetition, ‘perfectly silent’, and the interruption marked by the
semicolon make the reader feel ill-at-ease, deprived of hope by this despairing conclusion: not only
has the music become noise, but noise itself has faded away. Even rhythm, and thus motion, has
stopped. It is death, physical for Mrs. Sinico, emotional for Mr. Duffy, and the answer as to why it
must be so is encoded in these final lines, with the repetition of the phrase ‘perfectly silent’.
Mr. Duffy looks for an ideal of perfection, his unrealistically high moral standards paradoxically
polluting his soul and preventing him from joining ‘the feast of life’. This perfection, as Joyce
suggests, is impossible to attain. Its useless pursuit can only cause, as a result, emotional death.
Bear that in mind as we are going to analyse ‘The Dead’, where, for all the imperfections,
ambiguities and problematics of all the relationships portrayed, a small thread of hope is still
retraceable: not in speech, but in the realm of music and sound.
Music as a Unifying Agent in ‘The Dead’
Before examining ‘The Dead’, it is useful to keep in mind that Joyce initially meant to
conclude Dubliners with ‘Grace’, the last story of the section dedicated to ‘Public life’, which dealt
with religion. In a sarcastic, pitiless mockery of social relationships and religious institutions, Mr.
Kernan trips from the stairs, gets badly hurt and bites his tongue, mockingly recalling the Fall from
Eden. He is eventually rescued by his friends and brought home to his wife but, instead of deciding
to redeem himself by giving up drinking and living a better life, as the title may suggest, the tale
ends in a desecrating parody. The mid-section, which is the longest one, is particularly telling – pun
of words intended – of the failure of speech in everyday life. The incapability to understand the
world through language is a recurrent theme in the collection. The child in ‘The Sisters’ does not
know the meaning of the word paralysis, though he feels it as a dark, inexplicable force, along with
‘simony’ – a sin associated with the clergy, particularly in ‘Grace’ – and ‘gnomon’, i.e., ‘the
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stationary arm that projects the shadow on a sundial’. This is no coincidence, as the sundial is an
instrument used for the measurement of time through the projection of a shadow: a hint to human
conscience, that remains hidden in the dark.
In the second-to-last short story, the intercourse between Kernan and his associates is almost
upsetting to read: it is full of ignorance, triviality, and misquotations. As an early critic suggested, it
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is shockingly revealing of our everyday speeches, lacking in goodness, truth, and beauty, as well
as the reality Dubliners live in. The priest who gives the final blessing is indeed corrupted, and his
audience is made up of ignorant businessmen. Thus the process of demolishing institutions, began
in ‘The Dead’. See P. K. Saint-Amour, ‘Christmas Yet to Come’: Hospitality, Futurity, the Carol, and ‘The Dead’’, in
Representations , vol. 98 n° 1, University of California Press (Oakland, 2007), pp. 93-117.
29
J. Joyce, ‘A Painful Case’, p. 171.
30
Definition at: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/gnomon
31
A key triad both in Aristotelian Philosophy and in the theology of St. Thomas Aequinas. These influences in
Joyce’s production have been retraced by early critics. See M. Beebe, ‘Joyce and Aequinas: The Theory of Aesthetics’,
in James Joyce: Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A Selection of Critical Essays, pp. 151-171.