Araby | Araby and the Writings of James Joyce
In the following excerpted essay, he discusses some of the autobiographical elements of "Araby," which include Joyce's childhood in Dublin, Ireland, and how the exoticism of the real-life Araby festival, with its Far Eastern overtones, impacted the young Joyce. Stone also discusses the poet James Mangan's influence on Joyce's framing of the narrator's adoration of (the character of) Mangan's sister.
For "Araby'' preserves a central episode in Joyce's life, an episode he will endlessly recapitulate. The boy in "Araby," like the youthful Joyce himself, must begin to free himself from the nets and trammels of society. That beginning involves painful farewells and disturbing dislocations. The boy must dream "no more of enchanted days." He must forego the shimmering mirage of childhood, begin to see things as they really are. But to see things as they really are is only a prelude. Far in the distance lies his appointed (but as yet unimagined) task: to encounter the reality of experience and...
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