Uluslararası Sosyal Aratırmalar Dergisi The Journal of International Social Research Cilt: 7 Sayı: 30 Volume: 7 Issue: 30 www.sosyalarastirmalar.com Issn: 1307-9581 READING A LITTLE CLOUD AGAIN: A PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVE Mehmet Akif BALKAYA • Abstract James Joyce’s Dubliners, including fifteen stories, was first published in 1914, London. The stories were about the life of middle class Irish people living in Dublin in the first half of the 20th century. This study reveals that James Joyce’s main concern in A Little Cloud is to disclose the miserable condition of the city and the characters’ inner lives which is enabled by rereading the story in terms of psychoanalysis. In this sense, Dublin and the characters in the story will be analyzed with psychoanalytic criticism. Keywords: Dubliners, Psychoanalytic, Dublin, Freud, Lacan. Introduction Like all the other stories in Dubliners, A Little Cloud presents a realistic portrayal of Dublin and Dubliners. “It was a searing analysis of Irish middle- and lower-middle-class life, with DUBLIN not simply as its geographical setting but as the emotional and psychological locus as well” (Fargnoli and Gillespie, 2006: 45).In his guide about Joyce, Tindall writes: Though each of these stories has a beginning, a middle, and an end some seem lacking in conventional shape or import; yet, however unlike those in popular magazines, these stories are of a kind of more or less familiar since the time of Chekhov. Lacking in obvious action maybe, the stories of Dubliners disclose human situations, moments of intensity (Tindall, 1959: 3). Dublin suffered a lot throughout history from wars, plagues, British exploitation, which caused the decay and decline of Ireland, and Dublin. “On the surface these stories appear extremely transparent. As a rule, particularly at first glance, nothing sounds simpler than a sentence in Dubliners” (Bosinelli and Mosher, 1998: 13). Concordantly, Blades writes that The psychological realities of a person in preference to external considerations such as physical appearances are revealed. This is not to say that physical objects, settings, and appearances are not important at all, but I would say that Joyce seldom describes things simply for their own sake. Almost always such external features appear as a way of exploring symbolically the consciousness of the character under attention, so that physical objects often take on an internal life of their own (1996: 3). The aim of this study is to search the psychological realities of the characters of the story A Little Cloud in James Joyce’s Dubliners. The stories were written at a period when the • ResearchAssistant, Aksaray University,Faculty of ScienceandLetters,Western LanguagesandLiterature, Department of English Language andLiterature. e-mail: makif.balkaya@aksaray.edu.tr