Discuss the effectiveness of the passage in presenting the experience of isolation.
• Look closely at the ways and effects of Joyce's use of language and descriptive detail.
• Comment how the presentation of Mr.Duffy's experience relates to your reading of the collection as a whole. .
Like many of the tales in James Joyce's Dubliners, isolation is a common theme in A Painful Case, and the short passage to be scrutinised during the course of this essay particularly so. But before I detail the ways in which Joyce puts across this isolation, a brief recap of the events of the tale preceding the passage in question. Mr. Duffy lives a routine and isolated hermit-like existence in his room in West Dublin. He surrounds himself with rather conservative literature and philosophy, such as Nietzsche, from whom he borrows his views on love and romance. His routine is disrupted when he meets Mrs. Sinico, with whom he shares evenings talking and generally being friendly. When she shows signs of desiring to become intimate with him he breaks off the relationship. Years later he reads of her humble and, in his eyes, shameful death, and feels disgusted that he ever had anything to do with her. It is here that we find Mr. Duffy, having just read of her death. .
One of the most potent methods by which Joyce broadcasts a sense of isolation and loneliness is through his use of language. Even in the first few sentences cold, harsh words such as "cheerless", "quiet" or "empty", and elsewhere in the selected passage examples include "cold", "lonely" and "falling". This use of harsh adjectives that are devoid of any sense of warmth gives across the sense of isolation that Mr. Duffy must be experiencing. Another interesting point is that what Joyce pays most attention to in this passage (besides Mr. Duffy) is the scenery. Placing such emphasis on something inhuman and inanimate accentuates the lack of human presence and warmth in Duffy's life, particularly considering Joyce's choice of adjectives.
James Joyce Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. ... Dubliners: London, Penguin Group, 1996. ... James Joyce Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. ... Dubliners: London, Penguin Group, 1996. www.gradesaver.com/jamesjoyce/dubliners/thedead/html. ...
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