Araby, James Joyce | L. J. Morrissey (essay date 1982)

L. J. Morrissey (essay date 1982)

SOURCE: “Joyce's Narrative Strategies in ‘Araby,’” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1, Spring, 1982, pp. 45–52.

[In the following essay, Morrissey analyzes Joyce's narrative techniques.]

In his analysis of Roland Barthes's poetics of the novel, Jonathan Culler points to a “major flaw” in Barthes: “the absence of any code relating to narration (the reader's ability to collect items which help to characterize a narrator and to place the text in a kind of communicative circuit).”1 Yet, “identifying narrators is one of the primary ways of naturalizing fiction.”2 Paradoxically, Culler decides that although “the identification of narrators is an important interpretive strategy, … it cannot itself take one very far.”3 By examining Joyce's narrative strategies in Dubliners, we can challenge Culler's notion that “the identification …...

[The entire page is 3550 words long]

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