SOURCE: “The Motivation for Anguish in Joyce's ‘Araby’,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 15, No. 1, Winter, 1978, pp. 11–17.

In the following essay, Brugaletta and Hayden question important plot elements of “Araby.”

In his discussion of James Joyce's “Araby,” Epifanio San Juan, Jr. contributes to Joyce studies a predominantly valid discussion of plot.¹ We agree with San Juan in his assumption of the “relevance and qualified validity of all the existing interpretations of ‘Araby.’”² Our only disagreement with this critic's view of the story—our point of departure from that of other critics who have discussed the story—is in the evidently universal assumption that the one crucial conversation between the narrator and Mangan's sister actually took place.³ “The boy promised Mangan's sister to bring her a gift,” San Juan believes, later referring to the central passage as a “factual transcript of the first verbal exchange.”⁴

In our examination of...