The Erotic in Joyce's "A Painful Case" - Dubliners

The characters whom inhabit Joyce's world in "Dubliners," often have, as Harvard Literature Professor Fischer stated in lecture, a "limited way" of thinking about and understanding themselves and the world around them. Such "determinism," however, operates not on a broad cultural scale, but works in smaller, more local, more interior and more idiosyncratic ways. That is, the forces which govern Joyce's characters are not necessarily cultural or socioeconomic in nature, but rather, as Prof. Fischer …

…allow this moment of "self-transcendence" to take on poetic dimensions; Duffy may go "outside" of himself here, but, Joyce through the use of a cliched sexual metaphor and drab description of the train's "drone", maintains his, as Professor Fischer would say, "scrupulous meanness." The moment is thus dampened; Duffy's self-transcendence is not allowed to shine in full poetic fervor and "reality," although Joyce attempts to escape it, seeps back in through his words and metaphors.