Greg Barnhisel is an educator and Assistant Director of the Undergraduate Writing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In the following essay, he explores the major themes in "Araby, " including nationality, religion, and relationships between the sexes.

In his early story "Araby, " James Joyce prefigures many, if not all, of the themes which later became the focus of his writing. Joyce, often considered the greatest English-language novelist of the twentieth century, published few books in his lifetime. Chamber Music, a book of poems, appeared in 1907; Dubliners, a collection of short stories from which "Araby" is taken, was published in 1914; and his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, came out in the same year. The book for which Joyce is most famous, Ulysses, appeared in 1922 and was quickly banned. Finally, in 1939, Joyce published Finnegans Wake. Notwithstanding his small output, Joyce's work...