After "The Boarding House," the next two stories in Dubliners are "A Little Cloud" and "Counterparts." They have a similar structure, for in both a man comes home in the evening somewhat the worse for having had a few--"where there are four Irishmen," my wife's Irish grandmother says, "there's usually a fifth"--and faces a discouraging domestic situation. We have noted how the age of the main character keeps getting older as we progress through these stories, from schoolboys in the first few to the late-teen Eveline and now to thirtyish men in "A Little Cloud" and "Counterparts." They're married with children and things are not going well. When the "hero" of "Counterparts" arrives home near the end of the story, he enters the kitchen and, finding it dark and empty, bawls out his wife's name. There then follows this terse summary of their life together:
His wife was a little sharp-faced woman who bullied her husband when he was sober and was bullied by him when he was drunk. They had five children. A little boy came running down the stairs.
The story ends when the man beats this boy who is guilty of being present. It's an ugly scene but we are prevented from condemning him, perhaps, by the manner in which the objective, humanly convincing narrative of the man's suffocating work-a-day life has been rendered in the portion of the story I've skipped over.
The main character of "A Little Cloud" would be too timid to beat anyone. When he gets home, his wife berates him before handing off the baby so she can shop for tea before the store closes. When she gets back, the baby is crying and she berates him again. In between, he has been studying their flat, especially a picture of his wife and the "prim" furniture that reminds him of her. The theme of all these stories is entrapment.
