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Gallaher are almost brought to life with their slightly drunken conversation. Indeed,
Dubliners as a whole is viewed as quite a stressful and suffocating place, with its people

stressed and put-upon.
The story of A Little Cloud goes like this; one man - Little Chandler - meets an old

friend - Gallaher - for drinks when he returns to Dublin for a quick visit on his travels.
Whilst drinking perhaps a little too much, they talk about family, old friends and the places

they have been - the things they have experienced. When Little Chandler returns home his

baby son cries and we are left with tears brimming within him as his wife removes the child.
This is a literary take on a struggle we see day by day - children being taken from unfit

parents. He has succeeded in making the speech, emotions and actions of the story so intense

yet minimal that we can almost see the scenes playing out before us. Gallaher is a ‘brilliant
figure on the London Press’ and Little Chandler gives the impression of a small man who

‘could have been a writer if only he had put his mind to it’ (Wikipedia). These are
things people often think of themselves and others but Joyce has put it into words.

Throughout the story, whilst seeming to give the characters fairly standard things to discuss
for friends who seldom now meet, Joyce offers us little snippets of information concerning

people, rumours, ambitions and places. We cannot say for certain that these thoughts were

flavoured with his own or that they were invented to fit a character. However, we can
volunteer the opinion that Joyce must have some personal experience of the things he

discusses.
‘Yet this too contributes to the book’s overall sense of leaving

Things unsaid and unexpressed, the words of others being
A useful replacement for those of oneself.’

(P Harness, p258, 2005)

By this statement, can we truly deny that he did not use the story to express his own
feelings and thoughts of insignificance and stagnation? The words he writes in A Little

Cloud, in the entire collection, are personal to Joyce and we accept them as his work. He

refers to Chandler as little and we assume this is a nickname one would only attached to
another with personal knowledge. Gallaher appears as a travelled and successful man on the

surface. Could even say that the child not being given a name represented his own feelings
of being replaced as the centre of attention - or that he could never be good enough to be the

centre of attention. We know now that these fears were utterly unfounded as his works have
endured and are still being read.