How might Joyces biography inform or inflect Araby? Does the story seem to address€”directly or indirectly€”any contemporaneous historical...

There are
undoubtedly biographical elements in "," as there are in many of Joyce's works. The
young Joyce, like the unnamed boy narrator, lived in genteel poverty in Dublin, moving around
from place to place due to his father's improvidence. Growing up in the city, Joyce came to feel
the paralysis of Irish life, which manifested itself most strongly in this decaying outpost of
the British Empire.

The boy's neighborhood, like the many inhabited by Joyce
in his childhood, has seen better days (rather like Ireland herself). And it is little wonder
that he wants to escape into an altogether more glamorous, more exciting worldthe world
represented by the bazaar.

Joyce too would escape into a different world: the
world of the writer. This major change in his life's direction involved his leaving Ireland in
his early twenties, never to return. As far as he was concerned, Ireland, whether it was under
the temporal control of the British or under the spiritual control of the Catholic Church, was
no place for an artist, especially not one who aspired to contribute to the European literary
tradition. For Joyce, the continent of Europe was his "Araby," but unlike the boy in
the story, he found it.