630 Joyce, James
been a lucrative literary career. This is symbolized by
the “books of poetry upon his shelves” that he had
bought in his bachelor days, before he was commit-
ted to family life.
After his meeting, he returns home and begins
to examine with a different eye his surroundings. He
looks at a photograph of his wife Annie: “He looked
coldly into the eyes of the photograph and they
answered coldly. Certainly they were pretty and the
face itself was pretty. But he found something mean
in it.” Glancing around the room, he sees the same
meanness in the furniture around the room, all “too
prim and pretty.” The meanness again recalls the
limitedness and smallness that characterize Little
Chandler’s life. At this moment he experiences a
detachment from the woman he married, unable to
form a human connection with her or the home they
now share. As he falls deeper into contemplation, his
eyes fall on a volume of Byron’s poems and he begins
to read. He realizes in despair that any dream of a
literary career is merely an illusion, at which point
his child awakens and begins to cry. Chandler tries
to silence the child without success. The realization
of the illusion, together with his inability to silence
the child, a symbol of that which has held him back,
is too much for Chandler to bear. The child begins
to scream, and Chandler tries as hard as he can to
soothe the child, with no success. He gets a fright
imagining the child dead, and the possibility of him
being the cause of its death fills him with terror.
Annie returns to the room. She takes the baby back
and, with an accusatory tone, asks him what he did
to provoke the child. Chandler is reduced to a stut-
tering mess of guilt, for having made the child cry
in a fit of anger and frustration. Annie departs the
room with the child, leaving Chandler alone.
Like “Araby” and “Eveline,” this story ends
with Little Chandler left alone to contemplate
the frustrations of being tied down by family. By
opening the final paragraph with “Little Chan-
dler,” the reader is reminded of the smallness and
insignificance of Chandler and his individual hopes
and desires. As in the other two stories, there is an
apparent conflict, of having to look to the demands
of family duty, which seem to trump the fulfillment
of one’s own hopes and dreams.
Wern Mei Yong
iSolation in Dubliners
Many of the characters in Joyce’s Dubliners experi-
ence one form of isolation or another. In the story “A
Painful Case,” James Duffy is introduced as some-
one who “lived in Chapelizod because he wished to
live as far as possible from the city of which he was
a citizen.” There is a clear juxtaposition between
being a citizen of Dublin and his deliberate self-
exile from Dublin. Furthermore, he lives in a room
that is “uncarpeted,” suggesting a lack of warmth,
and whose walls “were free from pictures,” pointing
once again to a deliberate attempt to keep his world
separate from any intrusion by the outside world.
His room is described as being sparse and lacking
personality, and he had “neither companions nor
friends, church nor creed.”He lived a little distance from his body,
regarding his own acts with doubtful side-
glances. He had an odd autobiographical
habit which led him to compose in his mind
from time to time a short sentence about
himself containing a subject in the third per-
son and a predicate in the past tense.Duffy eventually meets Mrs. Sinico, with whom
he forms a relationship. Mrs Sinico is married, and
their relationship is kept in confidence from society,
which again reinforces the notion of isolation. Their
meetings often take place in “a little cottage outside
Dublin,” where they “spent their evenings alone.”
They would speak late into the evening, till darkness
enveloped them in the “dark discreet room,” and they
were united in “their isolation.”
In their last meeting before Duffy puts an end
to the relationship, Mrs. Sinico had “caught up
his hand passionately and pressed it to her cheek,”
which took Duffy by surprise. Mrs. Sinico’s yearn-
ing for companionship counters Duffy’s belief in the
“incurable loneliness” of humankind, a way of life he
has come to accept. One suspects that it is the only
way of life familiar to him and therefore desirous to
him. Because of their incompatible attitudes, Duffy
puts an end to the relationship.
Four years go by and Duffy one day reads in the
paper that Mrs. Sinico has been killed by a train.
Instead of expressing sympathy, he expresses revulsion: