JOYCE'S NARRATIVE STRATEGIES IN "ARABY"

Author(s): L. J. Morrissey
Source: Modern Fiction Studies , Spring 1982, Vol. 28, No. 1, SPECIAL ISSUE: THE
MODERN SHORT STORY (Spring 1982), pp. 45-52
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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JOYCE'S NARRATIVE STRATEGIES IN "ARABY"

(Tfr

L. J. Morrissey

IN HIS ANALYSIS OF Roland BarTHES'S POETICS of the novel, Jonathan

Culler points to a "major flaw" in Barthes: "the absence of any code
relating to narration (the reader's ability to collect items which help to
characterize a narrator and to place the text in a kind of communicative
circuit)."1 Yet, "identifying narrators is one of the primary ways of
naturalizing fiction."2 Paradoxically, Culler decides that although "the
identification of narrators is an important interpretive strategy, ... it
cannot itself take one very far."3 By examining Joyce's narrative strategies
in Dubliners, we can challenge Culler's notion that "the identification . . .
cannot . . . take one very far" in the interpretation of a text. We may
also be able to make some tentative suggestions about the poetics of
narration.

'Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 203. Jean Ricardou has recently set out a brief structuralist code
of narration ("Time of the Narration, Time of the Fiction," James Joyce Quarterly, 16, [1978-79], 7-15),
but it is concerned with the backward and forward movements in time, the speed of narration, simultaneity,
and repetition rather than with narrative stance. For a discussion (without resolution) of the complexities
of narration in "Araby," see the article by the MURGE group in James Joyce Quarterly, 18 (1981), 237-254.
2Culler, p. 200.
'Culler, p. 202.

Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 28, Number 1, Spring 1982, Copyright © by Purdue Research Foundation.
All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

45

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 Any careful reader of Dubliners is struck by the strength and oddity
of "Araby." Though it is shorter than "An Encounter," which precedes
it, or "A Little Cloud," eight stories into the collection, "Araby" is far
more memorable. The reason can be found in the narration. The first
two stories in Dubliners are straightforward first-person narratives. "I"
is the seventeenth word in "The Sisters," a story about a boy-narrator's
isolated struggle to comprehend the mystery of religion, rumor, and in
sanity. "An Encounter" begins with the collective "us" (eleven words
in) and shifts to the personal "I" as the boy moves from a diminishing
group to his private, half-comprehended sexual encounter. "Araby," the
third story, is the puzzle. It begins with its narrative code telling the reader
that it is a third-person story: "North Richmond Street, being blind, was
a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set
the boys free. An uninhabited house. . . ,"4 The narrator, distant, unin
volved, clearly not one of "the boys," critically views a fragment of smug,
lower-middle-class Dublin. From the first line, with its clear epic preterite
signal ("being" present referent, "was" past tense) there should be no
doubt that this will be a third-person tale. First-person narrators general
ly identify themselves immediately: "I was born in the year 1632, in the
city of York . . ." (Robinson Crusoe); "My father's family name being
Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip ..." (Great Expectations)-, "Call
me Ishmael . . (Moby Dick); "What's it going to be then, eh? There
was me, that is Alex ..." (Clockwork Orange). In the few instances where
the first-person narrator does not immediately identify himself, the tale
is usually about tale-telling itself, for instance, Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
Even there, we are given a subde signal that we have an involved narrator.5
In "Araby" there is no such signal. The opening is perfect third-person.
Then suddenly, sixty-seven words into the story, a possessive adjective
shifts our expectations: "the former tenant of our house." Thirty-nine
words later there can be no doubt of the shift into first-person narration:
"Among these / found. . . ." Either Joyce has made a serious mistake
in his narration, or he intends something by this shift.
As we read on in the story, we first notice a mixing of simple first
person "I" ("I found," "I liked," "I wished") and the collective pro
noun ("Our house," "we met," "sky above us," "our shouts"). Gradu
ally, the isolated "I" emerges, and the collective disappears. Very much
the same progress occurs in "An Encounter" where, from paragraph thir
teen through sixteen, the "I" gradually disengages himself from his com

4"Araby," in Dubliners: Text, Criticism and Notes, ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (Har
mondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 29. All other references in this article will be to this edition and will
be cited in the text. I have occasionally added italics to the quoted text.
5See L. J. Morrissey, "The Tellers in Heart of Darkness: Conrad's Chinese Boxes," Conradiana,
13 (1981), 142.

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panion Mahony for fear the man will think him as stupid as his friend.
In "An Encounter" the disengagement is essential; the actual and the
figurative encounter can only happen to the boy alone. This separation
of the ego also suggests that growing up is a process of isolation, of separa
tion from the group. Thus, Joyce is clearly not unsubtle in his use of
narrative codes; so there must be some explanation for this mixture of
first- and third-person and for the shift from collective to isolated first
person in "Araby."
If we go to the next tale in the collection, part of the answer emerges.
"Eveline," the story of a girl "over nineteen" (p. 38) who tries, and
fails, to flee from a stifling father and from Ireland, is told by a sym
pathetic, omniscient third-person narrator: "She sat at the window. . . .
She was tired . . . she heard footsteps. . . . One time there used to be
a field there in which they used to play . . ." (p. 36). Then in the last
lines of the story, the narrator coolly withdraws his sympathy and merely
observes her from without, judging her failure: "She set her white face
to him, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell
or recognition" (p. 41). She is now one of the damned, like Gabriel from
"The Dead," and Joyce's narrative code demonstrates this. The follow
ing story, "After the Race," is about the son of a Dublin "merchant
prince" (p. 43), actually a butcher, who tries to keep up with the inter
national racing set. For this tale Joyce uses his characteristically detached
narrator, who stays mostly outside his characters, occasionally making
aloof, damning judgments ("Rapid motion through space elates one; so
does notoriety; so does the possession of money. There were three good
reasons for Jimmy's excitement" [p. 44]) or relating the characters' con
fusion and anguish with his fine mixture of naturalistic, disparaging detail
and moral censoriousness ("He knew that he would regret in the morn
ing but at present he was glad of the rest, glad of the dark stupor that
would cover up his folly. He leaned his elbow on the table and rested
his head between his hands, counting the beats of his temple" [p. 48]).
Clearly "Araby" is the mediation between first and third person
stories in the collection. It also mediates between those characters who
are free of restraints, or who try to free themselves, and those who give
up, who succumb to Dublin and Ireland.6 Until "Araby," the children
tell their own stories; after "Araby," the narrator tells the tales of the
lost souls. The half-man, half-child of "Araby" emerges slowly from the
third person narration to tell his own tale.
In Joyce's fiction (perhaps in all fiction) the choice of first- or third
person narration is at least the expression of an author's moral relation
ship to his characters. Just as inevitably, the narrative stance implies reader

6A number of studies have examined the theme of entrapment and freedom in this collection;
see, for example, Arnold Goldman, The Joyce Paradox: Form and Freedom in His Fiction (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1966), pp. 1-21.

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 responsibility. As the author becomes active as a judge, readers become
passive. We need not judge lower-middle-class Dublin if the author judges
it for us by describing a "blind" street with houses personified as having
a "brown imperturbable face" or "conscious of decent lives within" (p.
29). But as the author becomes passive and apparently allows characters
to tell their own tales, readers become morally active. We must decide
how the boy really reacts to the bazaar, to the young lady at the door
of the stall, to the money counting. Joyce has opened "Araby" by dis
couraging the reader's moral alertness, only to make extraordinary
demands on it by the end of the tale. This shift in reader responsibility
is the reason for some of the strong reader response to the tale. Even
this is too simple a description of "Araby." It describes its place in the
collection and its mixture of narrative codes, but it does not describe the
full narrative complexity of the tale nor the reason for the mixture.
The first-person narrator in "Araby" is not one character, but three
(or better, three moods of a developing adolescent). Appropriately, Joyce
does not imagine that a character develops simply, moving from one stage
to another and abandoning all of his old characteristics. Instead Joyce
creates a tale of a boy at the edge of manhood, who has within him a
simple naif, a poetic romantic, and a harsh adult censor. We can
distinguish these three in their perceptions.
It is easy enough to distinguish between the naif and the romantic
perceptions syntactically. The naif is actively engaged with particular
events, and his direct sentences (with no internal modification) reflect this:
"I found a few paper-covered books" (p. 29); "I like the last best because
. . (p. 29); "the cold air stung us and we played in the streets" (p.
30); "If my uncle was seen turning the corner we hid ..." (p. 30).
In his romantic mood, the boy lovingly interprets and describes events;
thus the simple subject/verb sentence structure is interrupted with inter
nal modifiers: "Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the
rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered . . ." (p. 79);
"The space of sky above us was of ever-changing violet and towards it the
lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns" (p. 30); "the street light
from the kitchen windows had filled the areas" (p. 30).
The two perceptions of these two moods of the boy are also clearly
distinct. The naif is very matter-of-fact. He has found "the late tenant's
rusty bicycle pump" (p. 29) under one of the bushes in the back yard.
He prefers The Memoirs of Vidocq to Scott's The Abbot, not because Memoirs
is more salacious and less romantic, but because its "curled and damp
. . . leaves were yellow" (p. 29). He does not personify the books with
the usual "whose pages"; instead, it is "the pages of which." He reports
what must have been an ironic comment by adults as though it were
simple fact: "He had been a very charitable priest; in his will he had
left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister"

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(p. 29). The innocent "very" changes the whole tone of this adult sneer.
By contrast, in his romantic mood, it is all hearts leaping, "confused
adoration" (p. 31), borne chalices, "litanies" (p. 31), and prayers to "O
love! O love!" (p. 31).
These two moods are never absolutely separated; they merge in the
early part of the story. At times the sentiment of the romantic is syntac
tically phrased like an innocent's: "When she came out on the doorstep
my heart leaped" (p. 30). But the two tones are quite clearly there,
overlapping though they be. The romantic loves personification ("the
houses had grown sombre"; "all my senses seemed to veil themselves"
[p. 31]; "the lamps . . . lifted their feeble lanterns" [p. 30]); excessive
adjectives ("the high cold empty gloomy rooms" [p. 33]), and
melodramatic situations, kneeling on a "dark rainy evening" (p. 31) in
the room where the priest had died and praying to the girl. Perhaps the
two tones can be best distinguished in the paragraph which describes the
boy(s) waiting for the bazaar. First there is the overcharged rhetoric and
the complex syntax of the romantic: "At night in my bedroom and by
day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove
to read. The syllables of the word. ..." Then suddenly the simplicity
of the child returns: "I asked for leave to go to the bazaar on Saturday
night. My aunt was surprised and hoped it was not some Freemason af
fair" (p. 32). This is typical; he has two lives, one imaginative and the
other literal and factual. In the latter, he reports the colloquial Irish phras
ing of the aunt and uncle (pp. 33-34); even the girl's speech is reported
in lilting Irish phrasing ("She asked me was I going to Araby" [p. 31]);
and his actual encounter with her lacks all of the melodrama of the
paragraph just before it in which he prays to her. It is first "murmuring:
0 love! O love! many times." And then: "At last she spoke to me. When
she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know
what to answer. She asked me was I going to Araby. I forget whether
1 answered yes or no" (p. 31).
Not surprisingly, the innocent active boy is part of a group of boys
(thus the collective pronoun in the early part of the story) whose "shouts
[echoed]" as they "ran the gauntlet," and who "played until our bodies
glowed" (p. 30). The romantic prays by himself in the dark, watches
the girl every morning from under the blind, and isolates himself from
his "companions playing below in the streets" (p. 33) on the night of
the bazaar. Thus the same maturing isolation that we saw in "An En
counter" goes on here. In isolation, or in his imagination, he is roman
tic, a knight bearing his "chalice safely through a throng of foes" (p.
31). In fact, he is a young boy only slightly better off than "the rough
tribes from the cottages" (p. 30), living with an uncle given to drink.
Notice that although the realist and the romantic form a clear contrast
in the story, both are actively engaged with life, one with living and sens

JOYCE'S NARRATIVE 49

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 ing it, the other with translating it.
On the night he visits the bazaar, he begins as a romantic: "The
high cold empty rooms liberated me and I went from room to room sing
ing. ... I may have stood there for an hour, seeing nothing but the
brown-clad figure cast by my imagination . . (p. 33). By nine o'clock
when he has had to cajole his drunken uncle for the florin, the romantic
has been replaced by the realist. The syntax shifts to that of the active
boy: "I took my seat . . "After an intolerable delay the train moved
out . . "It crept . . "I remained . . "I passed out . .
"I could not find . . "I found . . "I recognized"; "I walked"
(p. 34); "I went . . ." (p. 35). In frustration, anxiety, and anger, the
character pays a shilling to get in, leaving him only eight pence for a
gift and the trip home. Even before he realizes this, the romance of Araby
has turned into a nightmare of anxiety and failure, and he can only
"[remember] with difficulty why I had come" (p. 35). The lights are
going out; he is alone (he was "alone in the bare carriage" [p. 34], and
at the bazaar he is excluded from the flirtatious group gathered around
the young lady "at the door of the stall" [p. 35]); only fragments of his
fantasy remain ("I looked humbly at the great jars that stood like eastern
guards at either side of the dark entrance to the stall" [p. 35]). At that
moment the character turns into harsh censor: "Gazing up into the
darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and
my eyes burned with anguish and anger" (p. 35). This final sentence
has both the force and directness of the naive boy ("I saw myself'; "my
eyes burned") and the poetic personifying capacity of the romantic ("a
creature driven and derided by vanity").
We have heard this third voice throughout the tale, as a kind of warn
ing undertone. At times it is the neutral voice of a more knowing boy.
When he says, "My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why)
. . ." (p. 31), the parenthesis suggests that a wiser human could. Much
the same is true when he says, "Her name sprang to my lips at moments
in. strange prayers and praise which I myself did not understand" (p.
31). At other times, the censor is brutally frank in his judgments: "Yet
her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood" (p. 30); "I thought
little of the future" (p. 32); "What innumerable follies laid waste my wak
ing and sleeping thoughts" (p. 32). The voice of this censor begins to
undercut the romantic musings of the character. The very word "im
agined" takes on a new tone for the reader in the context of this cen
sorious teller. This teller even censors the character's physical sensations:
"My heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom" (p. 31); "All my
senses seemed to desire to veil themselves" (p. 31). Here is the priestly
bourgeois voice of the harsh cynic with its concern for the "future" and
its willingness to call love "vanity," folly, a "summons to . . . foolish
blood." This voice has acted as a subtle narrative commentary on both

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the naive and the romantic moods of the boy. It has been particularly
harsh with the romantic boy. The tragedy of the tale is that all three
moods, or voices, coalesce in the final sentence, and it appears that the
voice of the censor is dominant.7 He has taken on the strong syntax of
the naive boy, and he has turned the romantic's poetry back into social
and religious rhetoric that judges and rejects the romantic impulse. The
boy has escaped the group of wild, free boys only to fall under the
repressive spell of adulthood in Ireland.
It is now clear why Joyce opens the tale in the third-person. It is
to aid, perhaps to check, the reader. It is too easy for the reader to reject
the romantic boy's excesses and follow the knowing, intimidating voice
of the bourgeois cynic. If we are so foolish, we will feel no tragic sensa
tions at the end of the story; we will simply agree with the "wiser" boy.
But we should feel tragic sensations, and we should know what it is that
has been lost. Here the opening narration helps us. Its rhetoric is exactly
that of the romantic boy, under better control. The sentences are inter
nally modified, subjects separated from verbs by verbal and prepositional
phrases and adjective clauses: "street, being blind, was"; "house oj two
storeys stood"; "houses oj the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed."
Inanimate objects are personified: "houses gazed . . . with . . .
imperturable faces." This romantic voice judges bourgeois and priestly
values, but not with the crudity of the boy's censor, who was essentially
a name caller. In other tales this same narrator will be as harsh as the
boy's censor, but here he uses poetic perception for criticism; he sees
the smugness of the houses; he perceives in colloquial language a truth
about this place. A street without an exit is "blind"; this is both
metaphorically and symbolically appropriate for bourgeois Dublin. The
poetic antithesis between the Christian Brothers and the freed boys is the
opposition on which the story is built, and it is given to us immediately
by the morally active third-person narrator. This antithesis is the Irish
conflict, and it is internalized in the boy: on one side, the deadly caution
of the censor and, on the other, the vibrant life of a boy of two moods,
one realistically recording the odors of the ashpit and stable, the other
romantically translating curses, sales litanies, or Mangan's sister into
beauty.
With this one text, the identification of the narrative code has taken
us very far indeed. It has explained both its oddity and its strength. By
helping us judge the several moods of the boy, it has determined the tone
of the story. It has also allowed us to speculate about the poetics of nar

7 Although he does not discuss narrative moods, David E. Jones in "Approaches to Dubliners:
Joyce's " James Joyce Quarterly, 15 (1978), sees the boy caught between "quagmire" and "fantasy," with
Joyce the final mediator (p. 114). He rather surprisingly concludes that the boy is "saved by a measure
of self-realization" (p. 115). He ignores how clearly the tale fits the tragic mythos of autumn in which
obstacles triumph over human will and endeavor.

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ration: about shifts in author-reader responsibility, about the moral respon
siveness of the reader, and about the way narrative codes affect the reader.

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