Araby (short story) Critical Essay | Critical Essay by William Bysshe Stein

Critical Essay by William Bysshe Stein

SOURCE: “Joyce's ‘Araby’: Paradise Lost,” in Perspective, Vol. 12, No. 4, Spring, 1962, pp. 215–22.

In the following essay, Stein surveys the religious imagery in “Araby.”

As L. A. G. Strong has observed in The Sacred River, “Christianity for Joyce is inescapable, and his critics cannot escape it either.” And he is right. No matter the work, Joyce always views the order and disorder of the world in terms of the Catholic faith in which he was reared. Turn though he does at times to other sanctions for his beliefs, he never quite shakes off the power of “a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.” Only the life of Christ objectifies the absolute moral standards by which man can make sense out of life.

This is true, in particular, of Dubliners. In their egoistic preoccupation with temporal pleasures and aspirations, the protagonists in this collection...
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