SOURCE: “‘Araby’ and the Palimpsest of Criticism or, Through a Glass Eye Darkly,” in Antioch Review, Vol. 26, No. 4, Winter, 1967, pp. 469–89.

In the following essay, ApRoberts refutes Professor Stone's thesis in the essay reprinted above, asserting that “Araby” is a self-contained story and should be read at face value.

“You see how easy it is to deceive one who is an artist in phrases. Avoid them, Miss Dale; they dazzle the penetration of the composer. That is why people like Mrs. Mountstuart see so little; they are bent on describing so brilliantly.”

—George Meredith, The Egoist

Vanity flee and verity fear.

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Everywhere in modern criticism the tide of symbolic interpretation runs full. Exegetes search the literature of the Middle Ages for the four-fold levels of Dante's allegory and return from below the surface dives into the Miller's and the Reeve's tales bearing interpretations by which...