Araby By James Joyce

James Joyce was raised as a Catholic in, for the most part, Catholic Ireland during the late 19th century. He attended college at “University College of the Catholic University in Dublin founded by John Henry Cardinal Newman in 1853” (Dettmar) where we had difficulties with his superiors. During his sophomore year, he wrote a paper that was repressed by the college president (Dettmar). The beginning of "Araby's" James Joyce sets a religious tone that moves throughout the neighborhood. Joyce writes, “NORTH RICHMOND STREET being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free” (Joyce 587). This demonstrates the sense of boredom and imprisonment that the narrator experiences. With Catholic traditions surround every part of the narrator’s life. Like the

Joyce was not able to express himself through his writing and eventually escalated to the point that he left Ireland to have more creative freedom. The dominance of Catholic images can also be found through the description of the narrator’s home in which Joyce stresses the impact of Catholicism in the narrator’s daily life, and the home’s previous tenant. The previous owner of the narrator’s home was a priest that passed away in the home. Joyce's discontent in regards to religious literature is revealed in the passage, "the waste room... was littered with old useless papers" (Joyce 587). The "waste" room and referring to the papers as "useless.” The value Joyce puts on the priest's readings becomes clear. After his writings being expelled from the, Catholic dominant, Irish community. Among the papers and books the narrator finds, he also finds the priest’s “wild garden” in the backyard, with “a central apple-tree and a few straggling bushes” (Joyce 587). With this passage, Joyce