earticle

영어

This article examines James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” through Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and explores how modernist fiction reconfigures the structure and sensibility of ancient tragedy. By examining what moves beyond existing ethical and social readings, and focusing on the work’s formal and aesthetic construction, Nietzsche’s concepts of the Apollonian, the Dionysian, and the Chorus are employed as key interpretive tools. Mr. Duffy embodies Apollonian qualities through order and restraint, while Mrs. Sinico represents the Dionysian through emotional openness and the dissolution of boundaries. Their relationship briefly unites these two artistic impulses but ultimately ends in incomplete reconciliation and eventual rupture. The newspaper report, the couples in the park, and the image and the sound of the freight train in the latter part of the narrative serve as modern transformations of the ancient tragic chorus, mediating the event on a social and collective level. As such, “A Painful Case” can be interpreted as a link between Joyce’s formal experimentation and Nietzsche’s concept of classical aesthetics, reopening the dialogue between classical and modern literature.