"Sin Dolor" Evokes mi amor

What is it like to live a life without pain? In his short story, "sin dolor" T. Coraghessan Boyle attempts to answer this question.

Boyle himself, a American man, has been widely published with fiction, nonfiction, short stories, and essays. He has been published in magazines from breasts to playboy to the New Yorker. He attended The State University of New York at Potsdam and University of Iowa, Iowa City. He received his PhD in British Literature. He has also appeared in an Absolut vodka add. He was originally named Thomas John Boyle, but changed his middle name to Coraghessan when he was 17. Quite a profile.

The Main character of "Sin Dolor" is a doctor, and describes himself descriptively and concisely as, "...no longer as young as I once was and the Hippocratic frisson of healing the lame and curing the incurable had been replaced by a sort of repetitious drudgery—nothing a surprise anymore and every patient who walked through the door diagnosed before they’d even pulled up a chair." His experience has led him to become bored with his profession, and as he diagnoses several different patients in the opening of the story in a series of digressions, Boyle takes us along for the ride of his last amazing diagnosis: a boy who feels no pain, Damaso Funes.

In Sin Dolor, Boyle does a good job of keeping my attention. the story flows chronologically through the tale Damaso and grapples with the question: is it a blessing to be free of pain? The doctor ignorantly remarks that it is, "a kind of medical miracle" that the boy feels no pain, but Boyle takes us on a trip through the sporadic visits the boy makes to the doctor, and the random encounters the two have, and shows the reader that pain, is in fact what makes us human. Damaso lives a life of mediocrity and oppression from his father, and he reveals in the end the he in fact does feel the pain, on a level aside from the physical pain a normal person incurs.

I enjoyed this short story a lot because it was engaging and well written. Boyle is an expert at story telling, and employs irony, varied syntax, and thematic shifts throughout the story brilliantly to demonstrate his belief that pain is central to the human existence, and a life without pain is in fact not worth living.

My favorite of the short stories so far; a great read.