James Joyce's famous collection, "the Dubliners", is a novel that "shows the emotional paralysis in the disillusion of love, fetters of marriage and obstacles in communication."1, among which 'A Painful Case' is one of the most impressive short stories. The protagonist, Mr. James Duffy, lived alone in a sombre house that was distant from the centre of Dublin, where he worked as a cashier. His life had been bland, routine, and monotonous, even to the degree of isolation, until he met a married woman, Mrs. Sinico, who became his intimate companion after several meetings. However, unfortunately, the woman died one day when she attempted to cross the line at Sydney Parade Station. After the incident, Mr. Duffy, having lost his only interlocutor, went back to its former dull state of life. Superficially, the story looks perfectly corresponding to the title --- a painful case, both for Mrs. Sinico and Mr. Duffy. Yet after a scrupulous analysis, I believe the whole narration, elevated by the title, to be an irony. .
I want to start from talking about Mrs. Sinico's death. When I read the story for the first time, I inclined to agree that Mr. Duffy was the one to blame for this unfortunate incident. For starters, he had that immediate, personal feeling, "revolted" and angry, that immediately linked him to the tragedy. After learning Mrs. Sinico's death from the newspaper, his subjective reaction was rather intense. Mr. Duffy thought that "she not only degraded herself; she had degraded him". The verb "degrade" was so strong that not only did it indicate that Mr. Duffy felt like being severely offended, it also induced readers to skip the consideration about whether the Mrs. Sinico's death was really relevant to Mr. Duffy. And in the same paragraph, exclamation marks and interjections were repeatedly used. Exclamatory sentences like "What an end!", "His soul's companion!", "Just God, what an end!", "But that she could have sunk so low!" kept demonstrating his astonishing and outrageous emotion.