James Joyce`s A Painful Case. A Modern Tristan Stranger to Himself
James Joyce`s A Painful Case. A Modern Tristan Stranger to Himself

Summary/Abstract: : A Painful Case, by James Joyce, published in Dubliners, is a story of resonance and dissonance. Music becomes the language of the protagonists. Mr. James Duffy, a bachelor, far from a modern Tristan, yet somehow connected with the medieval hero and poet, chooses music as an episode of his life, an episode when he reaches deeper layers of himself through the encounter with a married woman, Mrs. Emily Sinico. Music turns into complete silence in the last phrase of this short story. Why has the anti-hero made the choice of experiencing the plenitude of harmony if his next step is to create dissonance by retreating too early and too abruptly into his shell? The dissonance he creates impacts the woman, pushing her on the verge of abyss. The new modern Tristan is a stranger to himself; therefore he cannot take the harmonious episode of his life and turn it into a new opening. "A Painful Case" is a story of Eros and Thanatos, told through the mediation of the irony and the grotesque, a love story seen as an implosion, not as a full manifestation of feelings. Tristan cannot heal the stranger in himself. Through harmony with a soul companion, music has granted him the temporary alleviation of this burden.

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