The “brown imperturbable faces” of the other houses suggest a neighborhood of pious moralists keeping each other under constant surveillance. We are twice reminded in the opening moments that North Richmond Street is “blind.” At its dead end is an empty house, and along one side is a school whose description likens it to a prison. The dismal state of Joyce’s Dublin is suggested in part by the gloomy atmosphere of the story. These remembered elements come together in a story of a young boy in the intense grip of his first love, who imagines himself dispatched on a romantic quest by his beloved, only to realize in the end that his romantic notions were the naive fantasies of a child. Yet although Joyce’s life is deeply woven into his art, neither “Araby” nor any of his other works are merely autobiographical. “Araby” and the other stories of Dublin’s youth are tales of initiation into this gray world.Īs is the case with most of the stories in Dubliners, “Araby” takes its inspiration from remembered fragments of the author’s own childhood, including the Joyce family’s sometime residence on Dublin’s North Richmond Street, the Christian Brothers’ School that Joyce and some of his siblings briefly attended, and the “Araby” bazaar that passed through the city in May, 1894, when Joyce would have been 12 years old. On the whole, Joyce’s home city is not kindly portrayed in these stories he set out in Dubliners to produce what he called “a moral history of my country,” with a particular focus on the supposed “centre of paralysis,” Dublin itself. One of James Joyce’s most frequently anthologized works, “Araby” is the third in the trilogy of stories in his 1914 collection, Dubliners, which Joyce described in a letter to the publisher Grant Richards as “stories of my childhood.” Like its predecessors, “The Sisters” and “An Encounter,” “Araby” tells the story of an unfortunate fall from innocence, as a young boy comes to recognize the sorry state of the world in which he lives.
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