SOURCE: Lin, Paul. “Standing in the Empire: Drinking, Masculinity, and Modernity in ‘Counterparts.’” In Masculinities in Joyce: Postcolonial Constructions, edited by Christine van Boheemen-Saaf and Colleen Lamos, pp. 33-57. Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001.

In the following essay, Lin underscores the relationship between drinking and the masculine identity of the disenfranchised working-class male in Irish society, as exemplified in Joyce's “Counterparts.”

At the end of Joyce's “Counterparts,” the decidedly unheroic Farrington reluctantly makes his way home after a deplorable day at work and an even worse evening out on the town. Battered and broke, he violently redirects his anger and chagrin toward his son Tom; bullied at work and at the public houses, he bullies at home. The story closes with the frightened boy literally and figuratively at the mercy of his tyrannous father, offering repeatedly to “say a Hail Mary for you” (D [Dubliners] 98) in order to escape bodily punishment...