Youth and Political Paralysis Theme Analysis

In “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” seven men are supposed to be out drumming up votes for the Irish Nationalist Party (the group seeking independence from British rule). Instead, they are do-nothing gossips, sitting around the fire in the Party’s meeting room. Their laziness is especially obvious in the context of Ivy Day, an annual commemoration of the late Nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell, whom Joyce (and many of his generation) idolized. Without Parnell, many (including Joyce) believed that the fight for independence stagnated. In “Ivy Day,” Joyce vents his anger at his native Dublin’s political paralysis by depicting intergenerational corruption and stagnation: the old have become selfish hypocrites and they have corrupted the young into the same attitudes. The uselessness of the young and old of “Ivy Day” illustrates Joyce’s fear that political paralysis—especially of Ireland’s Nationalist party after Parnell’s death—is a self-perpetuating social illness that will doom the nation.

Old Jack—a well-meaning but useless character—embodies the weak spirit of Ireland’s older generation. Jack’s function is to keep the fire going in the hearth of the party’s Committee Room (a historic place where Parnell’s Nationalist team once rallied). But Jack only barely keeps the fire alive: he stokes the coals “judiciously,” but “mechanically,” “slowly,” and “thinly.” Symbolically, the fire stands for the political passion of the Nationalist party; in Parnell’s day, the fire presumably roared, but now it is insufficient to even warm or light the room. Characters complain of the cold, rubbing their hands dramatically as if “to produce a spark from them.” “Is that you?” they ask, squinting through the darkness. Symbolically, then, readers can see in the waning fire an embodiment of the great Parnell’s dying legacy, and Jack’s halfhearted, ineffective fire stoking suggests the inability of the older generation to inspire political passion in each other or in the youth.

In addition to failing to inspire the youth, Jack (and his whole generation) model poor behavior. This first becomes clear when Jack laments that, despite trying to raise his 19-year-old son right, the boy is a wayward drunk. Throughout this conversation, Jack reveals that he has been violent with his son: if he weren’t an old man, Jack claims, he’d “take the stick to [his son’s] back and beat him while I could stand over him—as I done many a time before.” This violence, Joyce implies, has a harmful (rather than a disciplinary) effect on Jack’s son, suggesting that his dissolute behavior may be Jack’s fault. Due to this, Jack’s son can be read as a metaphor for Ireland’s self-replicating cycle of misplaced discipline and self-defeat, and for the improbability of the younger generation being better than their parents. Joyce doubles down on this point later in the story when a 17-year-old delivery boy arrives with stout from the men’s boss and John Henchy offers the boy a bottle. Against his principles (after all, he’s just been on a tirade about his drunkard son), Jack opens the boy’s bottle and hands it to him, hinting at the older generation’s damaging, willfully-negligent attitude towards Ireland’s young. “That’s the way it begins,” Old Jack says of the cycle of moral decline to which he has just contributed. Clearly, Joyce finds the older generation to be harmful degenerates who are passing their behavior on to the young.

Joyce’s final damning depiction of Ireland’s decline is to depict the youngest generation with any political responsibility—represented by Mat O’Connor—as lazy. The story opens on O’Connor, a “grey-haired young man […] disfigured by many blotches and pimples.” Joyce makes this character physically both young and old, which suggests early decline. O’Connor’s premature age comes not just in his grey hair but also in his lethargy. Rather than canvassing for Nationalist votes, as he is being paid to do, he has been hiding out in the committee room because it’s cold and rainy outside. Instead of working for a political cause, he warms himself by Jack’s weak fire and smokes cigarettes. Twice in the story, O’Connor lights his cigarettes with campaign flyers promoting his boss, the Nationalist candidate (flyers that O’Connor was supposed to be distributing). This is the ultimate symbolic rejection of his political responsibility to fight for Ireland’s independence. With Old Jack representing the fall of the Irish Nationalist party, and the lazy Mat O’Connor and Old Jack’s drunk son representing Ireland’s bleak political future, the elderly and the young find common ground in their wavering principles and weak execution. This produces an all-encompassing image of doom for Ireland’s political future.