“A Little Cloud” is a modernist short story. Modernist literature emerged in the 20th century as a mode of writing that challenged traditional literary conventions by centering narratives on everyday people, telling stories in meandering and fragmented ways, and leaving readers without a happy ending. This movement emerged out of modernist writers’ disillusionment with industrialized, modern society—they did not want to write stories about joyful or heroic people because such narratives did not match the alienation they saw in society (especially among oppressed people).
This sort of alienation comes across in the ways that Little Chandler moves through the world. He does not feel connected to the people around him on the street (seeing only “untidy nurses and decrepit old men”), to his old friend Gallaher (whom he admires at first but then comes to see as “vulgar” and unsophisticated), to his wife (whom he sees as having “no passion” and “no rapture”), or to his infant son (whom he refers to as “it” rather than “he”). Further, Little Chandler works a job he doesn’t care about in order to sustain his life, a life that he experiences as being like a “prison.”
Little Chandler’s experience of life being like a prison also puts this story into the genre of “naturalism.” Naturalism is a form of realist writing that focuses specifically on the despair of oppressed people, with writers focusing on depicting the ways that people are trapped by their harsh circumstances. When Joyce describes in the story how Little Chandler “felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune,” he is communicating a central tenant of naturalist literature—that people’s fates in life are determined by the conditions into which they are born.
