The clerk, who appears to be trapped in a boring job, returns to his small apartment, his wife Annie, and their sleeping male infant. Little Tommy Chandler, the name which Joyce chose for the father, not for the infant, then begins to lose his temper.
The child becomes terrified and, in that cadence which all parents know, cries so violently that Chandler begins to count the seconds between screams. He looked at the contracted and quivering face of the child and began to be alarmed. He counted seven sobs without a break between them and caught the child to his breast in fright. If it died! Annie returns, glares at Chandler accusingly, and tries to calm the baby. The story ends with the following paragraph:. Little Chandler felt his cheeks suffused with shame and he stood back out of the lamplight.
After all, the next three pieces in the collection involve a drunken father beating his praying son, teenaged girls ridiculing an aging spinster, and a neglected wife stumbling Karenina-like onto the tracks of an oncoming train. But such issues do not necessarily help us interpret the story, for Joyce might, after all, have been drawing a portrait of an unfit father. Opposed to these are his unfulfilled aspirations to be a poet though he never writes and his desire for a more exotic sexual life.
In the first scene, Joyce invites us to imagine an ordinary man, still capable of a dream, but ruled by circumstances and his own, considerable inadequacies. In Chapter 4, Joyce presents a rare interaction between the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, and his brothers and sisters during the family tea. Structurally, this scene occurs at an important juncture. Immediately preceding the epiphany of "profane joy" which Stephen experiences on the beach while watching a girl wading Portrait , this episode also follows the interview with the religious director of his school, after which Stephen decides not to become a priest.
As he walks home to a squalid, over-crowded house, interesting parallels to "A Little Cloud" occur. Like Chandler, he crosses a bridge, symbolically connected to opposing attractions, but clearly, like Chandler, moving toward a new possibility.
