Araby is the third of the fifteen stories in Dubliners. This tale of the frustrated quest for beauty in the midst of drabness is both meticulously realistic in its handling of details of Dublin life and the Dublin scene and highly symbolic in that almost every image and incident suggests some particular aspect of the theme. Joyce was drawing on his own childhood recollections, and the uncle in the story is a reminiscence of Joyce's father. But in all the stories in Dubliners dealing with childhood,the child lives not with his parents but with an uncle and aunt-a symbol of that isolation and lack of proper relation between "consubstantial" ("in the flesh") parents and children which is a major theme in Joyce's work.
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<英美文學選讀>,外語教學與研究出版社