A Painful Gif

This gif is meant as a play on Mrs. Sinico’s suicide in “A Painful Case.” Just as the euphemism “a painful case” implies that the death was suicide without saying it outright, so too does the gif avoid showing the train actually making contact, only approaching. The  repetitive sense of impending death mimics the monotony of Mr. Duffy’s reserved life of intentional detachment–he narrates his life in the third person without ever truly living it, but instead seems to be simply waiting for death.