SOURCE: “The Green Stem of Fortune,” in A Scrupulous Meanness: A Study of Joyce's Early Work, University of Illinois Press, 1971, pp. 49–56.

In the following essay, Brandabur provides a thematic overview of “Araby.”

From the harsher portrayals of Dublin's youth encountering perversity in the first two stories, Joyce turns to romance. For “Araby” displays characteristics of “Romance” described by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism most clearly as it concerns the hero's power of action: “If superior in degree to other men and to his environment, the hero is the typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvelous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended.”¹ Although like all the stories in Dubliners, “Araby” falls most obviously into the ironic mode, for the reader finds himself “looking down on a...