The Prison of the Mundane Theme Analysis

Gallaher’s career success suggests to Little Chandler that he, too, could achieve more in life if he could only escape the limitations of Dublin. However, upon meeting Gallaher, Chandler’s bubble of expectation is burst. No longer a role model for success, Gallaher instead fuels Chandler’s disappointment and causes him to grow resentful. Reconnecting with Gallaher doesn’t end up inspiring Chandler to pursue poetry or leave Dublin in the pursuit of greater opportunities. Instead, their meeting causes Chandler to feel more deeply limited, dissatisfied, and resentful about his mundane, ordinary life. He is chained to an overworked and short-tempered wife, with an infant child to take care of, unable to pursue his dreams of writing poetry. Many of the stories in Dubliners end with the main character experiencing an epiphany (a sudden realization), and at the end of “A Little Cloud,” Little Chandler has such an epiphany. He realizes that he is “a prisoner for life,” locked in a self-created prison of fear, inaction, and resentment—he is as helpless as an infant to change his fate. Through Chandler’s inability to change his life, Joyce shows how the mundane is a prison—living a mundane life leads people to lose their zest for life and capacity for action.

Chandler feels deeply alienated from his wife, Annie, whom he sees as overworked, angry, changeable, and ordinary. The limitations of their mundane domestic life have caused Chandler to disconnect from her, and their strained marriage contributes to his larger sense of dissatisfaction and paralysis. Due to limited funds, Chandler and Annie cannot keep a servant, so Annie bears sole responsibility for taking care of their home and small child, with occasional help from her sister. She is clearly overworked, leading to her to “bad humour” and “short answers” to Chandler. She orders him around impatiently, as if he were a child. Consequently, Chandler feels disconnected from her, even slightly intimidated by her. His efforts to please her and connect with her often backfire. He recalls an incident where he tried to buy her a nice blouse: Annie at first sharply criticized the blouse as too expensive but then she loved it after trying it on. Chandler’s effort to do something nice for Annie faltered because of their limited income. Even though she ends up accepting the blouse, the incident left Chandler wary of her, seeing her as fickle and vain. More generally, Annie’s personality dissatisfies Chandler. He meditates on a photograph of her in their house: though pretty, Annie appears “unconscious,” with “no passion” and “no rapture.” Chandler sees “something mean” in her face—petty and small. He longingly thinks of the “rich Jewesses” Gallaher has met in Europe, and the women’s “dark Oriental” eyes. He regrets his marriage to the prim Annie: “Why had he married the eyes in the photograph?” He has no real connection to her, reducing her to mere body part instead of seeing her as his life partner. Annie seems as dissatisfied with Chandler as he is with her, as shown by her explosive anger toward him. Upon returning home from running an errand, she finds Chandler trying to soothe their crying baby. She glares at Chandler, yelling, “What have you done to him?” She assumes that an ordinary fact of domestic life—a crying baby—must be Chandler’s fault. As Chandler looks fearfully into his wife’s eyes, “his heart closed together as he met the hatred in them.” The image of Chandler’s heart closing up shows the extent to which the ordinary stresses of his home life have caused him to lose connection to his wife and whatever affection he once felt for her.

Similarly, Chandler’s efforts to escape into poetry are thwarted by the mundane realities of his home life, and his anger and frustration only exacerbate the situation. While Annie is out running errands, Chandler watches the baby. Bored and unhappy, he opens a volume of Lord Byron’s poetry. Reading Byron’s melancholy lines, Chandler yearns to write poetry like it. However, he is interrupted by the baby’s cries. Chandler’s frustration grows as he is unable to focus, and his epiphany occurs as he sees his whole life as hopeless: “It was useless. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t do anything. He was a prisoner for life.” Full of anger and a deeper resentment at his limited prospects, Chandler’s anger grows to the point that he actually screams “Stop” in the baby’s face. As would be expected, this exclamation only makes the child scream and “sob piteously,” and Chandler’s attempts to quiet the child only make it cry “more convulsively.” Chandler’s effort to escape into poetry fails as he is called back to his fatherly duty of comforting his infant. Rather than accepting this completely normal situation, Chandler’s frustration erupts into anger that only traps him further in his mundane domestic world.

At the story’s conclusion, Chandler’s epiphany—that he is imprisoned by his life—is heightened by imagery of the ordinary realities of Chandler’s home life making him feel deeply alienated, hopeless, and paralyzed. Annie returns from her errand, enraged to find the baby sobbing convulsively, and she immediately blames Chandler. She soothes the infant: “My little man! My little mannie! Was ‘ou frightened, love? There now, love!” Ironically, not just her infant son, but another “little man”—her husband—is deeply distressed and in need of comfort. However, Annie cannot know this they since their relationship is so estranged. Blamed and dismissed by his wife, Chandler steps back into the shadows, distancing himself physically and emotionally from his wife and child. He feels paralyzed and powerless to change the situation. As the baby stops crying, Chandler himself begins to cry: “tears of remorse started to his eyes.” The parallelism between the baby and Chandler’s crying suggests that he is so imprisoned by his ordinary life that he is like a crying baby: consumed by discontent, helpless, powerless to change anything, with no language but a cry.