Araby, James Joyce | Phillip F. Herring (essay date 1987)
Phillip F. Herring (essay date 1987)
SOURCE: “Trials of Adolescence,” in Joyce's Uncertainty Principle, Princeton University Press, 1987, pp. 3–38.
[In the following excerpt, Herring reveals the structural and thematic links between Joyce's “Araby” to “The Sisters” and “An Encounter.”]
“Araby” is the last in a set of three stories about how a youth is thwarted in his quest for transcendence. Each of the stories begins in the tedious surroundings of home or school, in reaction to which boys set for themselves idealized destinations involving eastward journeys: in one case it is a mystical state of mind associated with the priesthood, exotic dreams, and Persia; in the next story it is the Pigeon House at the most easterly point of Dublin's harbor (and anything that might symbolize). In the third story a bazaar named “Araby” casts an eastern enchantment over an adolescent mind. A further common characteristic is...
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