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 … cannot … take one very far” in the interpretation of a text. We may also be able to make some tentative suggestions about the poetics of narration.

Any...