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James Joyce’s “A Little Cloud” is a story of ambition, jealousy, and failed expectations. It tells the tale of Thomas Chandler, nicknamed “Little Chandler” for his short stature and timid manners, who lives an uneventful life in Dublin. Little Chandler’s insecurities come to a head when he meets an old friend for a drink who is living an adventurous life the likes of which Little Chandler can only dream of.
Little Chandler is stuck in an unhappy marriage and an uninspiring job. He is also insecure because he never lived up to his potential and became a writer. When the reader first meets Little Chandler, he is sitting in his office, waiting for the workday to conclude so he can meet with his old friend, Ignatius Gallaher. As he thinks about Gallaher’s successes as a London journalist, Little Chandler begins to reflect on his own career as a writer. Though he works as a clerk, a job in which writing plays a large part, Little Chandler aspires to be a poet—a writer whose material is human emotion, not drudgery. However, Little Chandler dejectedly accepts that such aspirations will never materialize. He has the knowledge, but none of the passionate drive to produce a work of his own. He has poetry books in his home, but he is unable to even share them with his wife, Annie. The unused poetry books in Little Chandler and Annie’s house serve as emblems of Little Chandler’s poetic desires. They are present and within reach, but his temerity and hesitation prevent him from pulling them from the shelf.
The rising action of “A Little Cloud” can be divided into two distinct sections that are set in two distinct locations. The first phase of the rising action portion of the text takes place at the bar where Little Chandler and Gallaher had agreed to meet. Little Chandler was initially excited to see his friend but his joy at seeing Gallaher diminishes with every moment that he spends in Gallaher’s presence. This is likely the case because every word out of Gallaher’s mouth feels, to Little Chandler, like a confirmation of all of the ways that Gallaher has succeeded where Little Chandler has failed. Gallaher is a writer, he is unmarried, he left Dublin, and he is well traveled—all things that Little Chandler is too timid to do. Interestingly, Little Chandler’s insecurities blind him to some of Gallaher’s faults. For example, Little Chandler is so preoccupied with Gallaher’s successful writing career that he is unable to process that Gallaher is both physically wearied by and unimpressed with his own profession.
In the second phase of the rising action portion of the text, Little Chandler sits in his sitting room in his “little house” and contemplates his life after he returns home from his meeting with Gallaher. Too timid to “assert his manhood” with Gallaher, this pent-up resentment follows him home, causing him to curse his own timidity, his marriage, and his insular, domestic life. While sitting in an armchair and holding his sleeping son, Little Chandler gazes at a framed picture of his wife, Annie, and reflects on their relationship. He concedes that Annie is pretty but he also finds her cold and judgmental. This sequence recalls the moment at the start of the story in which the narrator explains that Little Chandler is too shy to read poetry to Annie. Little Chandler’s inability to read to his wife and the frustration that he directs at his wife’s photograph hints at the contradictory meaning of marriage in his life: it acts as an inhibitor rather than an encouragement to fulfilling his desires. Readers are able to determine that Little Chandler likely married Annie because of societal pressures to do so, not because he wanted to start a family.
Little Chandler starts to panic that he will never be able to “escape” from the prison that is his life. His agitated state causes him to wake up his son who promptly begins to wail. Little Chandler’s agitated state continues to grow until, in the climax of the text, he screams at his infant son to be quiet. Little Chandler’s brief outburst highlights his capacity for cruelty, and the effects that unfulfilled aspirations can have on personal relationships. Little Chandler loses his temper and shouts fiercely at perhaps the only person in his reach smaller than him. Though the outburst is brief and Little Chandler quickly regrets it, the image of an adult man taking his disillusionment and frustration out on something so helpless is a bone-chilling picture of cruelty.
In the falling action portion of the text, Annie returns home and scolds her husband for waking up their baby. As he watches his family, Little Chandler experiences an epiphany that makes him realize he will never change his life. He knows he is a “prisoner” in the house. Little Chandler’s fleeting resistance is like a little cloud that passes in the sky. By the end of the story he feels ashamed of his disloyal behavior, completing the circle of emotions, from doubt to assurance to doubt, that he will probably repeat for the rest of his life. The story finishes where it began: with Little Chandler sighing about his unrealized aspirations, but submitting to the melancholy thought that “it was useless to struggle against fortune.”
