Ivy Day in the Committee Room

“When the dome was thinly covered his face lapsed into darkness but, as he set himself to fan the fire again, his crouching shadow ascended the opposite wall and his face slowly re-emerged into light.”

As the old laborer tends the dying embers, a new flame is lit from the ashes. This passage shows how Joyce uses images of light and shadow to mirror the hopes and disappointments of the Irish republican cause in the early 1900s.

“Mr. O’Connor had been engaged by Mr. Tierney’s agent to canvass one part of the ward but, as the weather was inclement and his boots let in the wet, he spent a great part of the day sitting by the fire in the Committee Room in Wicklow Street with Jack, the old caretaker.”

Mr. O’Connor is introduced as shirking his work as a canvasser for the Nationalist political candidate Mr. Tierney. Because the weather is bad, he sits inside and listens to the stories and troubles of an everyday workingman. This early passage sets up Mr. O’Connor as an ambivalent figure, as he has political beliefs but is shown as unwilling to sacrifice his personal comfort in support of the cause. This is part of Joyce’s realistic and complex portrayal of political action.

“He takes th’upper hand of me whenever he sees I’ve a sup taken. What’s the world coming to when sons speak that way to their father?”

Old Jack’s troubles with his alcoholic son mirror his wariness of Mr. Hynes’s politics. The youthful rebelliousness that Mr. Hynes expresses towards British rule reminds Old Jack of his own son’s disobedient behavior. Old Jack’s generational complaint plays into the story’s treatment of nostalgia for times gone by, a feeling that can create both dissatisfaction and inertia.