Dubliners Love in Dublin: A

Dubliners Love in Dublin: A Comparison of Joyce's "Araby" and "A Painful Case" The theme of romantic love, and more specifically of love's frustration, can be seen throughout the works of James Joyce. His famed collection of short stories, Dubliners, contains several snapshots of frustrated love from a variety of markedly different perspectives, and yet the end results -- loneliness, isolation, and angst -- are remarkably similar.

Through an exploration of young love in "Araby" and a more mature romance in "A Painful Case," it can be seen that Joyce vies love and the coming together of separate human hearts and minds as a universally elusive yet enticing goal of individuals of all conditions and situations. In "Araby," the sexual and romantic angst of the first-person adolescent narrator are palpable as he describes his desire to get a gift for the older girl who cannot possibly be interested in him as a lover.

The story closes with this narrator's acknowledgment of his own despondency stemming from a lack of sufficient sense of self: "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity" (par. 37). This incident, apparently a fairly truthful autobiographical tale on Joyce's part, illustrates the frustration and misdirection of youthful love and lust, which cannot be adequately or safely expressed to others because it is not understood by the self (Ehrlich, 309).

"Araby" is thus an un-heroic coming-of-age story pulled directly from the memory of the author in which age is still not reached. In contrast, "A Painful Case" tells the story of lonely life-long bachelor Mr. Duffy, whose frustration, angst, and lack of self-understanding are just as clearly rendered despite the definite remove from the concrete details of the author's own life. Mr. Duffy is older, established, and supremely orderly.

His routine is fixed, and, "He had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed…his life rolled out evenly -- an adventureless tale" (par. 4). This is quite different from Joyce' own relatively short life, which was far from routine or adventureless, and is also quite far from the uncertain adventure embarked upon by the protagonist in "Araby," who purposefully sets out to find romance and fails in his endeavor. Mr.

Duffy finds romance -- love, even -- but he is too unaware to realize what this could mean for him and for the woman he realizes he loves too late. Both Mr. Duffy and this would-be lover are isolated, caught in their own middle-aged loneliness through what are essentially a series of cowardly choices, while Araby's hero is somewhat brave if ultimately ineffective (Corrington, 182). The differences between these two protagonists and the stories themselves are made more interesting by the many similarities they share.

Both characters end up regretting the decisions they made regarding love and romance, and end up feeling their loneliness and isolation more sharply than they had before. Despite their difference in ages and situations, both characters also end with little seeming hope of correcting their mistakes and finding true love. In fact, it is suggested in both stories that there is no really way to know or understand another human being, and thus no way for love to ever be fully and truly explored and.