Dubliners: Counterparts

Passage: "Darkness, accompanied by a thick fog, was gaining upon the dusk of February and the lamps in Eustace Street had been lit."


The passage above holds a strong relevance in not only Counterparts, but also Araby. "When the short days of winter came dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners." The passage is referencing the myriad of motifs and themes that have been repeating. Both passages introduce the motif of darkness and British oppression. When the protagonist comes home to a dark house, he exclaims "Light the lamp. What do you mean by having the place in darkness?" For Dubliners, everything is dark. The protagonist is humiliated when he looses an arm wrestling fight. The defeat he exhibits is similar to the lead protagonist in A Little Cloud. In A Little Cloud, the protagonist exhibits intellectual defeat when he is debased by his British friend. The protagonist of Counterparts is defeated in an arm wrestling match, by a fellow Dubliner. This contrast shows the intellectual defeat, characterizing the successful British, and the physical, barbarian like, defeat, characterizing Ireland/Dubliners. The juxtaposition of the two stories help to accentuate the contrast of the British and Irish.

Similar, syntacitally, to the passage from Araby, the passage above is placed in the beginning of the story. By doing this, it creates the dark motif, and sets up the dark diction and tone. By choosing "accompanied by a thick fog", it alludes to a motif bigger than just the repeated "darkness". Since each story is syntactically placed to display a different age in life, the reader infers "a thick fog"as a symbol of what age brings into your life. At first is was "darkness", but as the protagonists get older and older, now "a thick fog" has accompanied the "darkness" that was already keeping the Dubliners down.