SOURCE: “Araby,” in James Joyce and the Craft of Fiction: An Interpretation of Dubliners, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972, pp. 54–67.

In the following essay, San Juan offers a stylistic analysis of “Araby.”

Among the various reasons why the existing interpretations of “Araby” have failed to grasp the principle of organization informing the narrative, I would point to the wrong emphasis placed upon stylistic details—the texture of description, the rhetorical appeals of imagery and ambiguous allusions, symbols, and so on—and the distortion of form created by this emphasis.¹ For if the formal whole of the story resides in the parts, the verbal devices which constitute the means of representation, then we may ask why the narrative has to present events in a sequence. And why should such an experience, consisting not only of images or of thoughts but also of decisions leading to acts that change the situation...