Short Stories

Araby

The story is full of frustration and bitterness. As he describes himself leaving the fairground, the now seemingly more mature narrator offers a brief but bitter insight into his youthful consciousness: "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger" (Dubliners 35). While the shift in perspective may seem a jolt at first reading, the sardonic tone that has recurred throughout the story both substantiates the more mature view and leaves to readers the task of interpreting the significance of the boy's disappointment. Is he crestfallen because he realizes how foolish he had been to inflate the significance of his trip to Araby, or does he feel a deeper, more lasting disappointment over the deceptive power of an incautious imagination? The story avoids prescriptive interpretation by ending too abruptly to resolve the question, but it has deftly advanced the issue of the role of the imagination for the reader to consider.

The thematic organization neatly sustains this aura of ambiguity. Like many of the stories in Dubliners, "Araby" contains an abundance of religious and folk imagery. It makes allusions to Catholic litanies and to mythological symbols evoking the Grail quest, blending the two to give a sense of the boy's efforts to impose meaning on the world as dominated by a mixture of faith and fantasy. More specifically, his conflation of dogma and romanticism foregrounds the impulse for escape that anyone with imaginative powers living on North Richmond Street would feel (Ratliff, Ronald Ray, p. 164).

The Rocking Horse Winner

Critical reaction to the story can be as complex as the story is straightforward. Many see the story as a tongue-in-cheek morality tale: The urge for financial gain outweighs familial affection, and money is more important than ...