In The Boarding House by James Joyce we have the theme of powerlessness, social opinion, paralysis and marriage. Taken from his Dubliners collection the story is narrated in the third person by an unnamed narrator and what is interesting about the story is that the reader is given the point of view of two of the main characters in the story, Mrs Mooney and Bob Doran. Some readers will also notice that Joyce, as he does in a lot of the stories in Dubliners, is using colours (brown and yellow) to symbolise decay and paralysis. Instances of this within the story include Joyce describing what some of the lodgers in Mrs Money’s boarding house have eaten for breakfast. Joyce tells the reader that ‘the table of the breakfast-room was covered with plates on which lay yellow streaks of eggs and morsels of bacon-fat and bacon rind.’ This description is significant as Joyce is symbolizing, through colour the state of paralysis that exists within Mrs Mooney’s boarding house, particularly for Bob Doran. Another instance of Joyce using colour (yellow) to highlight a state of paralysis is the gilt clock that Mrs Mooney looks at when she is waiting for Bob to come and talk to her.