In Joyce’s “The Boarding House” and “A Little Cloud” the protagonists’ autonomous motivations are suppressed by social mores, customs and conventions. Autonomy is impractical, because ecclesiastical norms are the heart of Dublin’s culture. The narrator’s use of free indirect discourse in “The Boarding House” and “A Little Cloud” reveals the characters’ latent observations, intentions, and emotions and, in doing so, shows the extent to which norms generate internal and external conflicts. In the opening scene of “A Little Cloud” Little Chandler gazes from his office window in the King’s Inns where he sees the light of the sunset over the gardens: “a shower of kindly golden dust… it flickered upon all the moving figures” (Joyce, 2013, p. 61). In the light, the nurses are described as “untidy” (Joyce, 2013, p. 61) and the old men are “decrepit” (Joyce, 2013, p. 61). Through free indirect discourse, it is difficult to separate the narrator’s perceptions from Little Chandler’s. The adjectives describe the sun’s light as a force which degenerates, but it is questionable if …show more content…
53), a tune strongly reminiscent of promiscuity; but there is little known of her past relationships. Yet the narrator points out that Mrs Mooney sees the affair “in this case” (Joyce, 2013, p. 54) as a moral problem. In this case allows the reader to infer that there have been past relationships. What haunts Mrs Mooney, is the thought of “mothers… who could not get their daughters off their hands” (Joyce, 2013, p. 56) and the “good screw” (Joyce, 2013, p. 56) Bob received from Polly. Mrs Mooney sees the situation as convenient: Bob Doran “had money enough to settle down on” (Joyce, 2013, p. 57), furthermore she knew that “[h]e was a serious young man, not rakish or loud voiced like the others” (Joyce, 2013, p. 56). The reference to “the others” (Joyce, 2013, p. 56) is the narrator confessing that there have been affairs in the